Teodor Ilie

I build vehicles that drive themselves.

On the Autonomy Team at MacLean Engineering, building self-driving underground mining vehicles.

Built: Gym-Khana deep RL simulator
Founder: Ingenuity Labs Racing
Based: Ontario, Canada

01 · About

From simulation to the real world

My Master's research at Queen's, with Ingenuity Labs and the QUARRG lab, asked whether deep reinforcement learning can control a car at the limit of grip. To find out I built Gym-Khana, a parallelized simulator for training policies to race and drift, then took those policies off the screen and onto a physical 1/10-scale car.

Alongside the research I founded Ingenuity Labs Racing, leading PhD, post-doc and MSc students through building a complete autonomous racing stack, from SLAM and planning to control. Four years as a full-stack developer at BMO taught me to write software other people depend on. Now I bring all of it to real machines on the Autonomy Team at MacLean Engineering.

Outside of work I train in kickboxing, play guitar, and design LEGO Technic vehicles from the ground up.

Interests

Reinforcement Learning
GenAI
Autonomous Control
Event Camera
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Automated Planning
Explainable AI
Cybersecurity
FinTech

Education

M.Sc., Computer Science (AI Spec.)Queen's University · 2024 – 2026
Vector for AI NSERC CGS OGS
B.Sc. (Hons), Computer ScienceQueen's University · 2018 – 2022

02 · Experience

Research and industry

Oct 2026 – Now
Designer Level II, Autonomy Team
MacLean Engineering
Building autonomous systems for underground mining vehicles.
Jul 2025 – 2026
Founder & Team Lead
Ingenuity Labs Racing
Founded and led Queen's F1TENTH / RoboRacer autonomous racing team of PhD, post-doc and MSc students, building ROS2 SLAM, planning and control stacks. Hosted Canada's first RoboRacer event.
See the project
Sep 2024 – 2026
Graduate Research Engineer
Ingenuity Labs, Queen's University
Developed deep RL controllers for autonomous vehicle drifting and loss-of-traction recovery, trained in a custom parallelized Gym simulator and deployed on a physical 1/10-scale car.
See the project
Sep 2022 – 2026
Full-Stack Software Developer
BMO Financial Group
Built SKOPE, an internal safekeeping app with Spring REST APIs and an Angular front end, in an Agile team practising TDD.
May 2020 – Aug 2021
Business Analyst (Summer Internships)
BMO Financial Group
Designed an automated Power BI reporting tool later adopted bank-wide, and coordinated month-end systems monitoring across teams.

03 · Projects

Selected work

Autonomous racing, reinforcement learning for robot navigation, probabilistic inference, and neural networks built from scratch.

Autonomous Racing Team Founder & Lead

Founder & Captain of Ingenuity Labs Racing, a team of PhD, post-doc, and MSc students competing internationally at F1Tenth/RoboRacer autonomous racing competitions.

Control
Perception
Planning
AV

View Code Team Site

Gym-Khana: Autonomous Racing & Drifting Gym Simulator

Designed a Gymnasium environment for training Deep Reinforcement Learning policies to race and drift on 1/10 scale or full-size vehicles.

Deep RL
Gym
SB3
Wandb
Vehicle dynamics

View Code View Docs

Deep RL for Active SLAM

Built an Active SLAM system for autonomous navigation using ROS2, Gazebo, SLAM Toolbox, and PIC4RL on a Clearpath Jackal robot.

ROS2
Gazebo
SLAM
Deep RL
Occupancy grid
Pose graph optimization

View Code Demo

CNN Handwriting Classifier

Designed and implemented a Convolutional Neural Network model in Python from scratch to classify handwritten digits, using the MNIST dataset.

Python
Convolutional Neural Network

View Code

AI Pacman Game

Implemented probabilistic inference algorithms to enable Pacman to hunt invisible ghosts based on noisy distance readings.

Inference
Python
AI

View Code

Monocular Visual Odometry in OpenCV

Implemented SIFT feature detection and brute-force matching to accomplish Monocular Visual Odometry (MVO)

OpenCV
MVO
Carla
AdverCity

View Code

Theory alignment via regular bisimulation

Designed a program using tarski, a PDDL Python library, to automatically detect isomorphism, which was used to automate checking correctness of candidate solutions.

PDDL
Python
tarski

Paper Demo Report

OpenGL Scene Generation

Designed a 3D scene with ray tracing, reflection, refraction, and surface rendering in OpenGL using C++

Computer Graphics
Ray Tracing
OpenGL

View Code

04 · Beyond code

LEGO Technic

Over a decade of designing working vehicles from scratch: custom gearboxes, transmissions, suspensions and axles, each engineered from original blueprints. The same instinct drives my software work: building a great system isn't so different from engineering a really capable truck.