available for opportunities
HectorTovar.
I'm a software engineer who builds full-stack products from the ground up — APIs, web apps, mobile apps, and the infrastructure behind them. I care about clean architecture, fast iteration, and shipping things that actually work.
On the side, I apply those same engineering principles to robotics at RoBorregos, building autonomous systems that compete internationally.
// selected work
Latest Projects.
Autonomous Vehicle
Fetch Mobile Manipulator Simulation
// career & achievements
My Journey.
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Hackathons attended
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Award-winning projects
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Projects completed
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Programming experience
B.Eng. in Robotics and Digital Systems
Tecnológico de Monterrey
Expected graduation June 2027. GPA 3.7/4.0 (90/100), 80% scholarship. Coursework in Data Structures & Algorithms, System-on-Chip Design, Computational Architecture, Control Systems, Advanced Embedded Systems, and IoT Implementation.
Paper Accepted @ MICAI 2026
AI-Driven Human-Robot Interaction & Adaptive Learning
Second peer-reviewed paper co-authored on AI-driven human-robot interaction and adaptive learning systems, accepted at MICAI 2026.
Outstanding Academic Achievement Award
Top 1% of Engineering Students
Recognized for academic excellence, ranking in the top 1% of engineering students at Tecnológico de Monterrey.
Fetch Mobile Manipulator Simulation
Autonomous Home-Assistance Stack
Built a full autonomous home-simulation stack for the Fetch mobile manipulator in Gazebo Classic 11 with ROS2 Humble. Integrated Nav2 with slam_toolbox for online mapping and navigation, plus an OpenAI Whisper speech-to-text node so the robot executes natural-language commands with sub-700ms transcription latency.
RoboCup @Home National
1st Place - National Championship
Outperformed teams from Mexico's top universities at the national RoboCup @Home competition with RoBorregos' general-purpose service robot.
Autonomous Vehicle
Manchester Robotics
Developed a full computer vision pipeline for traffic sign detection and autonomous line following, achieving a confusion matrix diagonal of 0.93+ across all sign classes. Optimized inference with TensorRT on embedded GPU hardware and architected the ROS2 node graph for perception, planning, and actuation.
RoBoCupido
AI Matchmaking Platform — Featured Project
Engineered an interactive dating platform using the T3 Stack (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma). Replaced static forms with a conversational AI agent (Gemini Pro) that interviews users and generates structured profiles, matching 200+ students with a 94% profile completion rate. Featured at the university Valentine's Day showcase.
Paper Accepted @ CLF 2025
FrEDie: AI/AR Virtual Assistant
Research paper on FrEDie accepted at the Conference on Learning Factories 2025, presenting the RAG-based adaptive tutoring agent built at the Physical AI Lab.
Expo Engineer 2025 Tec de Monterrey
1st Place - Physical Prototype
Awarded 1st place for the 'Coffee Collector Robot', showcasing the physical prototype development and integration.
John Deere Project
Waypoints RC Car
Developed a high-frequency closed-loop control system on an STM32 microcontroller using FreeRTOS and PID logic to autonomously regulate vehicle vectors with high precision.
LARC International 2025
1st Place - International
Engineered the computer vision system by training a YOLO model and deploying it on Jetson Xavier for real-time object detection at 93% accuracy. Developed the collection algorithm for autonomous coffee bean retrieval.
Research Intern — FrEDie Project
Physical AI Lab, MIT Research Collaboration
Researching Physical AI for laboratory robotics, building a communication bridge between LLM agents (LangGraph, Claude AI) and robotic systems to expose real-time robot state, sensor telemetry, and control primitives via a unified API. Designed a Human-in-the-Loop tutoring engine with conversation summarization and persistent state, deployed on Azure with Docker and Cloudflare Tunnels.
HackMTY 2025
2nd Place - Banorte Challenge
Won 2nd place among 400+ competitors with 'SmartBan', a React Native Fintech solution featuring secure authentication via Clerk and a centralized payment platform linked to PostgreSQL.
DigiKey Ambassador
Sole Ambassador for Latin America
Selected as the only Ambassador for Latin America for the 2025-2026 term, representing Tecnológico de Monterrey and creating technical content and outreach to 520+ students within the maker community.
Front-End & Mobile Developer
Einter (Contract)
Built a React 19 + TypeScript admin dashboard with 11 protected modules (CRUD, role-based access across 3 permission levels) and a companion Android app in Kotlin (MVVM) for warehouse staff with QR scanning, shipment tracking, and waste recording.
General Purpose Service Robot
Research & Development — RoBorregos, Tec de Monterrey
Engineered a hybrid pose analysis pipeline (MediaPipe + SVMs + LSTMs) achieving 96% gesture recognition accuracy. Optimized Visual ReID for 93% tracking consistency across occlusions, and researched monocular depth decomposition for autonomous grasping with an xArm6.
LARC National 2025
1st Place - Mexican Robotics Tournament
Participated in the Open Challenge developing an autonomous coffee collector robot. Engineered a custom PCB for the robot enabling high-precision sensor input, EMI shielding, and a flexible layout for rapid hardware iteration.
Software Engineer
Ventologix (Grupo Mufo)
Sole engineer for two production SaaS dashboards on the T3 Stack serving real-time IoT telemetry to industrial clients — product line accounts for 40% of total company revenue. Overhauled the MySQL schema with temporal partitioning, cutting query execution time by 90% at scale, and integrated a multi-agent LangGraph system for anomaly detection and trend analysis.
Joined Roborregos
Electronics & Programming Member
Joined the representative robotics team of Tecnológico de Monterrey, contributing to the development of autonomous robots for international competitions.
Expo Engineer
Secure Vault Project
Presented hardware enhancements for bank security, implementing FaceID recognition, alarm systems, and double verification entry protocols.
ShellHacks 2024 Winner
Waymo's Challenge - 1st Place
Secured 1st place in Waymo's Challenge by developing 'EmergencyAct', a real-time fall detection system using machine learning to outperform traditional wearables in public transport safety.