Vetted Research Assistants

Samuel Ehrenstein

Screened

Mid-level Computer Vision & ML Researcher specializing in medical imaging and 3D vision

Chapel Hill, NC4y exp

“PhD (CS) candidate with hands-on autonomy and robotics experience: improved safety-critical behavior for Kodiak’s self-driving 18-wheeler trucks, increasing overtaking clearance by ~2 feet and reducing safety alerts. Also debugged a C++ SLAM system for 3D colon reconstruction and built a low-budget distributed simulation cluster using Linux, Docker, and Python, plus implemented multi-hop SSH-based comms for an underwater robotics competition minibot.”

“AI engineer building and deploying deep-learning-based optimization/control systems for petrochemical plants, with a focus on maintaining operational stability under real-world constraints. Core contributor to model and inference design; introduced a stability-focused non-linear objective and sped up second-layer optimization via on-the-fly first-order approximations. Experienced using Kubernetes for end-to-end testing and effective in translating customer expectations into measurable evaluation plots for non-technical stakeholders.”

Akashleena Sarkar

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in robotics and real-time distributed systems

Mountain View, CA2y exp

“Robotics software engineer focused on low-compute navigation/SLAM: built a 6-DOF SLAM validation pipeline (IMU + 2D LiDAR + ultrasonic) producing ~1cm OctoMap accuracy and deployed it on an Intel Atom by optimizing particle-filter SLAM with a greedy max-likelihood update. Deep ROS 2 experience (executors, composable/lifecycle nodes, QoS, timestamping) plus simulation and deployment tooling (Gazebo C++ plugins, Docker, CI/CD, ROS 2 build farm) and drone navigation work with MAVROS/PX4.”

“Graduate robotics researcher (Georgia Tech/Georgia Tech Research Institute) who helped modernize the Georgia Tech Robotarium by migrating its comms stack from MQTT to ROS2 across MATLAB/Python and updating embedded Teensy firmware for new sensors. Currently validating ToF distance sensors and integrating IMUs, with planned GTSAM factor-graph SLAM sensor fusion; also debugged and improved a decentralized coverage-control algorithm at swarm scale (1000–2000 agents) using computational geometry and literature-backed methods.”

“Robotics software engineer who built the full control stack for a fleet of manufacturing/repair robots in Relativity Space R&D (perception, planning, motion control, integration, deployment). Has ROS/ROS 2 experience spanning custom SLAM (LiDAR+IMU), multi-robot coordination, and multi-drone control (Pixhawk 4, minimum-snap trajectories), with strong real-world debugging and simulation/CI testing practices (Gazebo, CI/CD, some Docker).”

Ho-Wei Lu

Screened

Junior Robotics Engineer specializing in motion planning and control

Berkeley, USA1y exp

“Robotics software engineer who built a ROS2-based ping-pong ball interception system on a 7-DOF Sawyer arm, spanning real-time vision, trajectory prediction, and an MPC joint-velocity controller to hit a flying ball within ~1 second. Demonstrated strong real-time debugging and systems integration skills (timestamp-based latency analysis, event-based redesign, ROS2 QoS tuning) and is currently working with Isaac Sim in Docker with GitHub-based CI/CD for assembly-task simulation.”

“Backend/ML systems engineer with experience at SDSC, UCSD, and Media.net, building production semantic dataset/model discovery using embeddings + Solr KNN and LLM-based intent/reranking at 5M+ dataset scale. Emphasizes offline/online separation for predictable serving, has delivered measurable gains (23% retrieval accuracy, 38% latency reduction) and helped secure a $3M+ NSF grant.”