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York academic awarded prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship

York academic awarded prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship

Posted on 27 January 2026

An academic at the University of York has been awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship to accelerate the launch of a spin-out company dedicated to making communications networks fail safe.

Dr Abdulhamed Waraiet, from the University of York’s School of Physics, Engineering and Technology

Modern autonomous systems in ports, factories, and logistics hubs rely on mobile robots that are never allowed to fail. However, conventional connectivity remains fragile, with single points of failure and "handover" glitches that cause robots to stop, leading to significant downtime and losses running into billions of dollars each year.

Ultra-resilient

When fully up and running, ROBUSTIENT will provide ultra-resilient wireless connectivity for mission-critical environments. By reinventing how networks handle mobility and failures, ROBUSTIENT ensures that automation in manufacturing, logistics, and transport never stops.

Dr Abdulhamed Waraiet, from the University of York’s School of Physics, Engineering and Technology and co-founder and CEO of ROBUSTIENT, said: “The spin-out is the culmination of 18 months of intensive, team-wide development across both the technical and commercial fronts, with strong and consistent support from the academic and commercialisation teams.

“This Fellowship award will now allow us to accelerate industrial trials and take the company to the next stage.”

Dr Waraiet said ROBUSTIENT is able to use an "intelligent software brain" that enables seamless connectivity using standard private 5G infrastructure, its patented methods and algorithms will ensure robots continue to operate even during failures, eliminating coverage gaps and glitches that plague current systems.

High-growth

The Fellowship will allow Dr Waraiet to transition ROBUSTIENT’s patented technology from university research into a high-growth commercial venture.

The company has already secured significant interest from industry, with an active trial at the Port of Tyne currently underway.

Dr Waraiet added: “The Fellowship will support ROBUSTIENT’s mission to become the wireless backbone for high-stakes industries where failure is not an option.

“Plans for the coming year include progressing real-world validation, with further industrial trials, and transitioning from university research into a commercial-ready private 5G solution.”

Further information:

Further information on the Fellowship: https://enterprisehub.raeng.org.uk/programmes/enterprise-fellowships/

Further information on Dr Abdulhamed Waraiet:

Holds an MSc in Signal Processing and Communications from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of York, completed within 36 months under the supervision of Prof. K. Cumanan. During his PhD worked as a Research Engineer in MediaTek’s Research Centre in Cambridgeshire, within their 3GPP standards team, contributing to early 6G research and patentable innovations, work that resulted in two patent filings and a MediaTek Integrity Award for Outstanding Contribution.

Following his PhD, joined York as a Research Associate, working across major funded projects including the £5.3m UK Government–funded REACH project and an EPSRC-funded programme on Cell-Free Massive MIMO for future networks. A key outcome of this work was the co-development of an O-RAN-compatible cell-free open-source simulation tool, some of which were demonstrated by the O-RAN Alliance at MWC Barcelona 2025. In 2025, he was also awarded the KM Stott Prize for Excellence in Research.

Over the past 18 months, focus has increasingly shifted towards commercialisation. With strong support from the University’s commercialisation team and the academics Prof. K. Cumanan and Prof. D. Grace, he completed Northern Accelerator’s Future Founders programme, followed by Innovate UK’s ICURe Explore and ICURe Exploit programmes, and co-invented two filed patents that underpin the superior value of our cell-free technology.

This work laid the foundations for ROBUSTIENT and directly led to the successful Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship application.