About the Author

Anil Mahtani is a computer scientist who has been working for the past 5 years on underwater robotics. He first started working in the field with his master's thesis, where he developed a software architecture for a low-cost ROV. During the development of his thesis, he also became the team leader and lead developer of AVORA, a team of university students that designed and developed an autonomous underwater vehicle for the Students Autonomous Underwater Challenge – Europe (SAUC-E) in 2012. That same year, he completed his thesis and his MSc in computer science at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and shortly thereafter, he became a software engineer at SeeByte Ltd, a world leader in smart software solutions for underwater systems.

During his tenure at SeeByte Ltd, Anil was key to the development of several semi-autonomous and autonomous underwater systems for the military and the oil and gas industries. In those projects, he was heavily involved in the development of autonomous systems, the design of distributed software architectures, and low-level software development and has also contributed to providing computer vision solutions for front-looking sonar imagery. At SeeByte Ltd., he has also achieved the position of project manager, managing a team of engineers developing and maintaining the internal core C++ libraries.

His professional interests lie mainly in software engineering, algorithms, distributed systems, networks, and operating systems. Anil's main role in robotics is to provide efficient and robust software solutions, addressing not only the current problems at hand but also foreseeing future problems or possible enhancements. Given his experience, he is also an asset when dealing with computer vision, machine learning, and control problems. Anil is interested in DIY and electronics, and he has developed several Arduino libraries that he has contributed back to the community.