Overview
Ali Junaid is the founder and CEO of effecon, a company he founded in January 2025, and is based in Leuven. Since September 2024 he has also been a product owner at BASF.
Before that he was a project manager at Colruyt Group Smart Technics from August 2022 to August 2024. He spent three years at Flanders Make, joining in September 2019 as an associate robotics application engineer, becoming a robotics application engineer in April 2021 and then a project manager from August 2021 to July 2022. Earlier he was a technical project manager at Unmanned Life, a research associate at KU Leuven from 2017 to 2019, a research associate at Kingston University, a consultant robotics engineer at Aidrivers Ltd., a researcher at Gyeongsang National University from 2013 to 2016 and an intern at Pakistan Aeronautical Complex.
He holds a PhD in industrial engineering technology from KU Leuven, a master's degree in control systems engineering from Gyeongsang National University and a bachelor's degree in mechatronics from Air University.
Career history
In the news
- The robot was never told a single box size. It worked them out on its own. Every box a different size, one pallet, no pattern editor. ThRiVer measures each box as it arrives and decides where it fits best on the stack already built. Thanks to Dardi Shehu and Yaskawa Benelux for the HC10 Cobot, and to Sammy Vande Kerckhove for the GCPi electric vacuum pump allowing suction gripping without compressed air. Smart Palletizing is just one of the applications running on ThRiVer. More coming soon.👇 #PhysicalAI #SmartPalletizing
- Reflective and bare metal parts are not an edge case. They are most of what comes through machining and sheet metal, and conventional 3D vision struggles with them. Check out the new blog on why that happens and what it costs on the floor. https://lnkd.in/e8MEgDut
- Two prompts to set up a bin picking job on flat, shiny, overlapping parts. This is what we mean by Intelligent Robotics. Made Accessible.
- Pack 24 green rolls into a carton. Each roll is 135 mm long and 50 mm in diameter." That's the whole setup. No pattern editor, no robot code. Soft goods are the hard case: a roll has no rigid shape to lock a pattern around. A stored recipe can't cope. Not because it's badly written, but because it was written before the carton existed. What that's worth on a line: cartons packed to the same standard all shift, boxes filled properly instead of approximately, and packers moved to work that needs a person. For a shifting mix,
- The robot was never the most expensive part. The setup was. It still gets me, watching a typed sentence turn into a packed carton. Intelligent robotics, made accessible. Special thanks to Sammy Vande Kerckhove from Schmalz for the electrical vacuum generator behind our compressed-air-free gripping. It cut the setup time even further!
- Deploying robots on production floors teaches you one thing about hype. A demo has to work once. A line has to work ten thousand times, on a night shift, with nobody from the vendor in the building. Much of the physical AI conversation right now is about humanoids and robots that can do anything. That work matters, and it will get there. But most plants are not waiting for a robot that can do anything. They are waiting for one that can take on their next job without a new project. Measured that way, this is where physical AI is
- The interesting part here is not the calibration. It is that nothing in ThRiVer changed between different robot brands. Thanks to Dardi Shehu at Yaskawa Benelux for arranging the robot arm. Getting a second brand in front of the software this early is what turns vendor-agnostic from a design intention into something we can actually show.
- The least glamorous jobs are usually the ones worth automating first. Hand-eye calibration won't excite anyone. But dull, easy-to-get-wrong tasks are exactly where a team loses its time. Take enough of them off the plate, and automation starts to pay for itself. #ThRiVer #Effecon #IndustrialRobotics #PhysicalAI
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