01 · Profile

What I do

Portrait of Susana Sánchez Restrepo working with a collaborative robot arm

I lead software products for complex, regulated systems: medical devices and assistive robots that have to work for clinicians, patients and operators, not only in the lab.

I am a mechatronics engineer with a PhD in control and robotics, and I have spent twelve years building robots hands-on in research labs, start-ups, a scale-up and an international group. In each of those places I ended up shaping the product as much as the code: what to build, for whom, and how it would really be used. Product ownership in medtech is where that path naturally led.

PhDin control and robotics (2018), after engineering degrees in Colombia and France
7engineers led at Niryo, through the Ned2 launch at CES 2022
15+robots worked on hands-on across my career
3languages: Spanish native, French bilingual, English professional

One path, many kinds of robotics

2014–2018 · Research: PhD at CEA with Université de Toulouse III, on robots that learn to assist people by demonstration.
2018–2019 · Logistics: Technical lead at Movu Robotics for the first 15 mobile robots deployed in production.
2019–2021 · Social robots: R&D engineer at SoftBank Robotics, on interaction and perception for humanoid robots.
2021–2022 · Cobots: Technical lead at Niryo, with a 7-person software team and the Ned2 roadmap.
2022–2024 · SaaS: Advisor and co-founder on software products, including Banana Army and Rumble Studio, now spOken.
2024–2026 · Assistive: R&D engineer at ISIR, CNRS, where I built Bloom.
2026 · Medtech: Senior Product Owner Software at Echosens.

How I workWhat the work covers, and the question I keep coming back to

Concretely, my work has covered product framing and roadmaps, specifications, real-time control laws, robot-agnostic software architectures, teleoperation and supervision interfaces, and validation on real platforms rather than only in isolated prototypes.

Across factories, warehouses, social robots and assistive arms I keep returning to one question: how can a complex system become both technically strong and genuinely useful for the people who interact with it?

I translate between researchers, engineers, users, clinicians, product stakeholders, partners and clients, and I see that translation as part of the product work, not something separate from it. The Extender consortium case study shows it in practice.

User-centered by defaultFrom co-design workshops to specifications

Development is not only a technical exercise. It means understanding real situations, real constraints and the people who will live with the result.

Co-design: User workshops, co-design sessions and field constraints feed directly into technical decisions.
Framing: Product framing, use-case definition and specification work for software and robotics projects.
Interfaces: UX review and interface thinking for HMI, teleoperation and web-based tools.
Agency: Systems that support human agency rather than forcing rigid usage patterns.
Training: Google UX Design foundations course, on top of years of practice.