Mehmet Baha Dursun

Working on robot learning, surgical robotics, localization, and autonomous systems.

Hello! I am originally from Turkey and currently based in Odense, Denmark. I started my MSc in Advanced Robotics at the University of Southern Denmark in August 2025 with a full scholarship.

Alongside my studies, I work full-time (remotely, from Denmark) as a Robotics Engineer at Saha Robotik and part-time as a Student Research Assistant at SDU. I built the company's core localization stack and now focus mainly on OpenArm and vision-language-action models for real-world robot learning.

Updates

Now Started leading Saha's bimanual restaurant-manipulation project, including its research, planning, learning pipeline, and the planned SDU and Saha Eurostars collaboration.
Oct 2025 - May 2026 Started working as a Student Research Assistant at SDU under the supervision of Iñigo Iturrate, focusing on Diffusion Policy for the dVRK and building the full pipeline end to end, from demonstrations and training to physical closed-loop evaluation.
August 2025 Started the MSc in Advanced Robotics at SDU with a full scholarship.
Feb - Apr 2025 Led Saha Robotik's ROS training program in Azerbaijan: one month of remote teaching followed by on-site training and student project evaluations.
2024 Led KOU-Mekatronom at the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge: the only Turkish finalist in 2024 and global top 24 from 160 international teams.
2024 Mentored autonomous-vehicle projects and supported lower-year students as a laboratory assistant at Kocaeli University.
October 2023 Joined Saha Robotik as a full-time Robotics Engineer; still working there.
2022 - 2023 Led the team in the national Teknofest Robotaxi program, progressing from 19th place to a sixth-place final result.
November 2021 Joined KOU-Mekatronom; later led the 20-person team in 2024 and still support it as a mentor in 2026, now with very limited time and only on critical points.
2021 Completed a Mitsubishi PLC internship and volunteered as a STEM tutor for middle- and high-school students during the COVID-19 period.

Projects & Works

View project

Bimanual Robot for Restaurant Table Clearing

Project Lead · Saha Robotik

2026 - Present · Early-stage project

Building Saha's restaurant-manipulation pipeline from the ground up

Leading the research, planning, hardware, data, and VLA pipeline. The direction starts from ALOHA and UMI and aims toward a scalable, glove-based demonstration workflow for restaurant tasks, together with an SDU and Saha Eurostars collaboration.

Project Page• OpenArm• UMI

View project

Diffusion Policy for Robotic Suturing with the dVRK

Mehmet Baha Dursun · University of Southern Denmark

Student Research Assistant, October 2025 - May 2026

End-to-end pipeline on the physical da Vinci Research Kit

Synchronized data collection, bimanual diffusion-policy training, DINOv2 representation analysis, ROS 1 deployment, and closed-loop evaluation.

Project Page• Report• Video• Supervisor

View work

Localization Lead at Saha Robotik

Robotics Engineer · Saha Robotik

October 2023 - Present

24/7 commercial autonomy in large-scale environments

Built much of the core localization and mapping architecture, plus the dynamic and static obstacle-detection algorithm, used by more than 400 commercial robots operating 24/7; I now advise mainly on localization while focusing on OpenArm and VLA. To the best of my knowledge, the 187,514 m² Istanbul Airport map is the largest publicly shared indoor map used for an autonomous service-robot deployment.

Project Page• GitHub• Video• Company