Maximilian Köhlenbeck

Automation Engineering student building AI and robotics systems.

Interested in reinforcement learning, physical AI and systems that interact with the real world.

Bremen · Work-study program at KUKA and Hochschule Bremen

Double CartPoleTQC

Loading simulation…

Fig. 1: One model, four poses. I trained this policy myself with TQC. It runs live in your browser. Pick a pose or give a pole a nudge. Technical write-up

About me

Bremen

Since October 2024 I've been studying Automation Engineering in a dual work-study program. I learn the theory at Hochschule Bremen and spend my practical phases at KUKA.

AI-assisted engineering

I use coding agents like Claude Code and Codex heavily for implementation. I focus on the engineering around it: requirements, system design and architecture, experiments, debugging, integration, and validating whether the system actually works.

Now

reBot Arm B601-RS robot arm

My current project. I'm training the arm on physical AI tasks: computer vision and path planning, built with ROS 2, MoveIt and RViz2. That includes getting from the real arm into simulation and back again: Real2Sim and Sim2Real.

Sesame Robot with reinforcement learning

I'm building a Sesame Robot and training it with reinforcement learning. The double pendulum at the top of this page was the start. Now it moves from simulation to a real robot. This keeps running alongside the robot arm.

Projects

Helpy

An assistant that watches an expert work, listens to their narration and asks about decisions at natural pauses. The session becomes a Work Map of steps, rules and reasons. A new colleague then practices with it, and mistakes get caught before saving. Screenshots are OCR'd and redacted right in the browser. Started at Hack-Nation 7.

Architecture

Capture

  1. Screen and voice
  2. OCR and redaction in the browser
  3. Questions at pauses

Teach

  1. Debrief and teach-back
  2. Work Map
  3. Practice with guardrails
Measurements: Helpy
Screenshot pipeline (sparse screen)378 ms end to end
Screenshot pipeline (dense screen)1,512 ms end to end
Captureevery 2 s, full-resolution frame

TypeScript · React · TanStack Start · Convex · Claude · ElevenLabs · Tesseract.js

Developer Island

A Dynamic Island for the Windows desktop. A small capsule at the top of the screen shows my Claude Code and Codex usage, music, a focus timer, meetings and system health. It reads the tools' local logs, sends nothing to the cloud and idles at 55 MB and 0.03 % of one CPU core. The code is open source.

Architecture

Data

  1. Local logs, media sessions and sensors
  2. Providers
  3. Immutable snapshots
  4. SQLite history

Display

  1. View models
  2. State machine
  3. Fixed-size transparent window
  4. Composition springs
Measurements: Developer Island
Idle, compact, 60 s window55 MB working set, 16 ms CPU (0.03 % of one core)
Warm start47 ms (only the changed transcript is re-read)
Tests382 unit tests

C# · .NET 10 · WinUI 3 · SQLite · xUnit

Baulify

Started at the Smart Region Hackathon Offenburg. A platform where utilities, municipalities and contractors coordinate roadworks. It shows conflicts before the same street gets dug up twice. After the hackathon I kept building: an AI reads requests from PDFs or free text and pre-fills the form, approvals work through a link without an account, plus a map and a landing page.

Architecture

Requests

  1. PDF or free text
  2. LLM via OpenRouter
  3. Pre-filled form

Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Drizzle · MapLibre · LLM via OpenRouter

AI automations with n8n

Three automations for small businesses. Extract invoices from PDFs and check that the line items actually add up to the total. Sort incoming emails and prepare replies as drafts, never send them automatically. Track prices and stock in online shops that have no API. When the AI isn't sure, a human decides.

Architecture

Invoices

  1. PDF invoice
  2. LLM extraction
  3. Line items vs. total
  4. Human decides when unsure

n8n · LLM via HTTP · Google Sheets · Airtable · Slack · Gmail

All projects (8)

Hackathons

October 2026

Mobile Robotics Hackathon · 1st place

We sorted waste with a robot arm, using 6D pose estimation and machine learning.

May 2026

Smart Region Hackathon Offenburg

This is where Baulify started.

Certificates

Google Cloud

Applying AI Principles with Google Cloud

Tools & technologies

Grouped by how I've actually used them.

Reinforcement learning & simulation
Gymnasium, Stable-Baselines3 (PPO, SAC, TQC), MuJoCo, spring-mass simulation
Robotics
ROS 2, MoveIt, RViz2, computer vision, path planning
Local AI & speech
faster-whisper, Piper TTS, Ollama, ONNX / DirectML, LLMs via OpenRouter
Software & web
Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, C#, .NET, WinUI 3, Next.js, Astro, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MapLibre
Automation & tooling
n8n, Claude Code, Codex, Git
Hardware
3D printing
Languages
German (native), English (C1)

Contact

Running a hackathon, building something with robots or just want to talk? Message me on LinkedIn or send an email.

Mobile Robotics Hackathon: sorting waste with a robot arm

A hackathon write-up: camera-to-robot calibration with AprilTags from 20 poses, grasping with ROS 2 and MoveIt, sorting objects by their height, and the computer vision part that did not make it into the demo.

ROS 2 · MoveIt · Python · AprilTag · Claude Code

Developer Island: a Dynamic Island for the Windows desktop

A native Windows status capsule built with .NET 10 and WinUI 3: a fixed-size transparent window, spring morphs, event-driven providers that read local usage logs, and an idle cost measured in milliseconds.

C# · .NET 10 · WinUI 3 · Windows App SDK · SQLite · LibreHardwareMonitor · xUnit · Inno Setup

Helpy: capturing an expert's judgment while they work

A hackathon project that records an expert's workflow, asks for the reasoning behind decisions and turns it into a Work Map, with a guided practice mode that catches mistakes before they are saved.

TypeScript · React 19 · TanStack Start · Convex · Anthropic · ElevenLabs · Tesseract.js · Railway