Researcher
Robotics & Autonomous Systems,
Royal Military Academy
Address
Avenue De La Renaissance 30, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Contact Information
Email: theo.engels@mil.be
Théo Engels is a researcher in the Robotics & Autonomous Systems unit of the Department of Mechanics at the Belgian Royal Military Academy. He contributes to the FORCES project, which leverages the memory safety features of the Rust programming language to improve the security and reliability of robotic systems in the face of cyber threats.
He holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from ECAM Brussels Engineering School, earned in 2024.
During his studies, he discovered his passion for robotics engineering while participating in the Eurobot competition. This experience inspired him to focus on embedded systems, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
His master’s thesis involved developing a real-time obstacle detection system for ground robots using machine learning. This system was specifically designed for autonomous robots used in equine arena harrowing, developed in collaboration with Quimesis and Equestrian Technology.
Publications
2025
- R. De Greef, A. Discepoli, E. Aguililla Klein, T. Engels, K. Hasselmann, and A. Paolillo, “Towards Macro-Aware C-to-Rust Transpilation (WIP)," in Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2025, p. 57–61.
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [DOI]
The automatic translation of legacy C code to Rust presents significant challenges, particularly in handling preprocessor macros. C macros introduce metaprogramming constructs that operate at the text level, outside of C’s syntax tree, making their direct translation to Rust non-trivial. Existing transpilers –- source-to-source compilers –- expand macros before translation, sacrificing their abstraction and reducing code maintainability. In this work, we introduce Oxidize, a macro-aware C-to-Rust transpilation framework that preserves macro semantics by translating C macros into Rust-compatible constructs while selectively expanding only those that interfere with Rust’s stricter semantics. We evaluate our techniques on a small-scale study of real-world macros and find that the majority can be safely and idiomatically transpiled without full expansion.
@inproceedings{10.1145/3735452.3735535, author = {De Greef, Robbe and Discepoli, Attilio and Aguililla Klein, Esteban and Engels, Th'{e}o and Hasselmann, Ken and Paolillo, Antonio}, title = {Towards Macro-Aware C-to-Rust Transpilation (WIP)}, year = {2025}, isbn = {9798400719219}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3735452.3735535}, doi = {10.1145/3735452.3735535}, abstract = {The automatic translation of legacy C code to Rust presents significant challenges, particularly in handling preprocessor macros. C macros introduce metaprogramming constructs that operate at the text level, outside of C's syntax tree, making their direct translation to Rust non-trivial. Existing transpilers --- source-to-source compilers --- expand macros before translation, sacrificing their abstraction and reducing code maintainability. In this work, we introduce Oxidize, a macro-aware C-to-Rust transpilation framework that preserves macro semantics by translating C macros into Rust-compatible constructs while selectively expanding only those that interfere with Rust's stricter semantics. We evaluate our techniques on a small-scale study of real-world macros and find that the majority can be safely and idiomatically transpiled without full expansion.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems}, pages = {57–61}, numpages = {5}, keywords = {Abstract Syntax Tree, C, Embedded, Macros, Metaprogramming, Preprocessor, Rust, Transpilation}, location = {Seoul, Republic of Korea}, unit= {meca-ras}, project= {FORCES} series = {LCTES '25} } - T. Engels, A. Discepoli, R. De Greef, E. Aguililla Klein, F. D’Agostino, R. Gunsett, J. Pisane, K. Hasselmann, and A. Paolillo, “FORCES: An Incremental Transpiler from C/C++ to Rust for Robust and Secure Robotics Systems," in Workshop on Rust for Robotics: Building Robust Foundations for Tomorrow’s Autonomous Systems, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025.
[BibTeX]@inproceedings{engels2025forces, author = {Engels, Th{'e}o and Discepoli, Attilio and De Greef, Robbe and Aguililla Klein, Esteban and D'Agostino, Francesco and Gunsett, Remi and Pisane, Jonathan and Hasselmann, Ken and Paolillo, Antonio}, title = {{FORCES}: An Incremental Transpiler from {C/C++} to {Rust} for Robust and Secure Robotics Systems}, booktitle = {Workshop on Rust for Robotics: Building Robust Foundations for Tomorrow’s Autonomous Systems, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}, year = {2025}, unit= {meca-ras}, project= {FORCES}, note = {Workshop Paper} }