Jose Hernandez
Co-Founder & CTO at Poke & Wiggle
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJose Hernandez is a robotics and AI leader with a PhD in machine learning and a decade of hands-on experience building robot control stacks, from firmware to cloud-connected AI apps. As Co-Founder & CTO of Poke & Wiggle and former Head of R&D Machine Learning at Franka Emika, he has repeatedly scaled teams and production robot farms to teach manipulation through real-world experience. He combines product leadership and engineering rigor—having led Neatleaf’s German subsidiary and shipped three iterations of its robotic platform—with deep open-source contributions to prominent Franka ROS and libfranka projects. Comfortable moving between research and product, he focuses on robust control, safety-aware interfaces, and preventing runtime discontinuities in deployed systems. Unusually for a robotics CTO, he also brings a creative background in classical violin performance, reflecting a blend of technical precision and creative problem-solving.
10 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
University of SevilleDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik at Technical University of MunichBachelor’s Degree Music Performance (Violin), Bachelor’s Degree Music Performance (Violin) at CSM Manuel Castillo (Seville)
English, French, German, Spanish
Github Skills (8)
robotics10
c-language10
rate-limiting10
robot-control10
cprogramming-language10
ros10
motion-planning9
dynamic8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
frankaemika/franka_ros
Aug 2017 - Dec 2018
ROS integration for Franka research robots
Role in this project:
Robotics Engineer
Robotics EngineerContributions:69 commits, 1 comment in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Jose primarily contributed to the development and improvement of Franka Emika robot controllers within a ROS environment. Their work involved implementing and modifying Cartesian impedance controllers, force feedback mechanisms, and interactive markers for pose manipulation. Furthermore, the user addressed naming warnings, corrected minor code style, and added the joint state publisher to visualize desired joint positions.
roboticsfrankaros2rosfranka-emika
frankaemika/libfranka
Sep 2017 - Dec 2018
C++ library for Franka research robots
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:85 commits, 4 comments, 1 issue in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Jose's commits focused on enhancing the functionality and robustness of example code within the `libfranka` library. Their work included the addition of rate saturation mechanisms to the joint position and velocity interfaces, aiming to prevent discontinuities. The user also corrected bugs in the for loop and improved the quality of comments within the example code, focusing on the application of velocity and acceleration limits for robot control.
roboticscppfrankac-libraryfranka-emika
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