VP of Autonomy @ Skydio
I’m a roboticist living in San Francisco. I lead the autonomy group at Skydio, where we build the best drones in the world for inspection, mapping, and situational awareness. Our team holds the state of the art in complex autonomous flight.
About Me
I was born in Yerevan, Armenia and grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska playing with moose. I did my undergraduate study at Princeton University and graduate study at Stanford University. In my free time I enjoy playing guitar and drums, traveling, windsurfing, and playing soccer. I also love chess, especially the bughouse variant.
My technical interests are in computer vision, deep learning, nonlinear optimization, and symbolic computation. I also enjoy building interactive visualizations and AI-enhanced music. In the past I’ve worked on hexapedal robots, robot arms, micro-robot factories, solar panel farms, and self-balancing motorcycles.
Skydio
I’ve worked at Skydio since April 2015 and was one of its first employees. I have worked as an engineer on all of our core autonomy systems, and now focus on technical management of about 50 world-class engineers and researchers. Our charter is to develop robust algorithmic approaches to visual autonomy, to enable widespread impact of drones as trustworthy and intelligent tools. We strive for a creative and collaborative environment, where we move from research to product in a rapid iteration cycle.
If you are interested in joining the Skydio autonomy team, contact me or see our careers page.
Riffusion
I'm a founder and board member of Riffusion, a startup focused on lowering the barrier to music creation for consumers. Our goal is to make everyone into a musician and bring a future where music is interactive and personalized.
SymForce
I am the initial creator of SymForce, a library for fast symbolic computation, code generation, and nonlinear optimization in robotics and related domains. Symbolic computation has been a passion of mine for 15 years and I believe it’s a powerful and underused model in many scientific fields. SymForce powers many of our algorithms at Skydio and I’m grateful to have been able to release it. Watch the video and read our paper!
News
2022.11 : Featured Article by Abe Peck @ Inside Unmanned Systems
2022.11 : Seminar on Autonomy @ USC ECE (thanks Somil!)
2022.10 : Trusted Autonomy Briefing @ Pentagon (my first visit!)
2022.08 : SymForce Lunch + Learn @ Joby
2022.07 : Oral, RSS @ Columbia
2022.06 : Keynote, ICUAS @ Dubrovnik
2022.04 : First Skydio hackathon!
2022.04 : SymForce was accepted to RSS 2022!
2022.01 : Skydio KeyFrame is launched to all customers.
2022.01 : Skydio 2+ launches with increased battery life and range.
2021.12 : Guest Lecture, 16.485 - Visual Navigation (Luca Carlone) @ MIT
2021.10 : Info Session, Indy Autonomous Challenge @ MIT + Pitt
2021.06 : Workshop on Perception and Action in Dynamic Environments Workshop @ ICRA 2021
2021.06 : Workshop on Aerial Robotics @ ICRA 2021
2021.06 : Skydio 3D Scan is released! Watch the hype video and keynote, and check out some 3D models.
2021.02 : Seminar for Robotics Today @ MIT
2021.02 : Seminar for SCIEN @ Stanford
2021.03 : Talk @ Ai4 Technical Summit
2021.01 : Talk @ AI Accelerator Festival
2020:07 : Skydio officially publishes Responsible Use Principles for ethical conduct.
2020.06 : Presentation on DESI Grant @ AFORC
2019.11 : Thanks to Vladimir Nekrasov for a fantastic internship improving our obstacle avoidance system.
2018.11 : Guest Lecture, 16.485 - Visual Navigation (Luca Carlone) @ MIT
2018.11 : Guest Lecture, CS 287 - Advanced Robotics (Pieter Abbeel @ Berkeley)
2019.11 : PNT Symposium 2019 @ Stanford
2019.10 : Skydio 2 launches to the world, sells out in 48 hours!
2019.10 : SF Drones Meetup @ Bolt SF
2019.06 : Embedded Vision Workshop @ CVPR 2019
2019.05 : Cheers to Greg Kahn for a great research internship!
2019.04 : Skydio autonomy invited to workshops @ ICRA (1, 2), RSS, and CVPR
2019.03 : Robotics Showcase @ Bloomberg SF
2018.12 : Guest Lecture, 16.S398 - Visual Navigation (Luca Carlone) @ MIT
2018.11 : Guest Lecture, AA 248E - Aerial Robotics (David Lentink) @ Stanford
2018.10 : R1 lands in Apple retail stores and Amazon!
2018.09 : Skydio announces SDK to build apps for flying cameras
2018.08 : LentinkLab + BDML + Skydio awarded DESI basic research grant
2018.08 : Guest Lecture, AE 483 - Navigation and Control (Grace Gao) @ UIUC
2018.08 : We had seven great autonomy interns this summer. Special shout out to the talented Somil Bansal.
2018.03 : AI Workshop @ NYCDFF
2018.03 : ZEDtalk @ Zoox
2018.03 : Speaker @ Society of Artificers
2018.02 : Skydio R1 launches as the first fully autonomous drone!
2017.12 : Tech Talk, SUAVE @ Stanford
2017.11 : GRASP Special Seminar @ UPenn
2017.11 : Robotics Seminar @ Princeton
2017.07 : Our deep stereo paper is a Spotlight Oral @ ICCV! Thanks to Alex Kendall for his awesome work.
2017.06 : Skydio Research Deep Dive @ CVPR 2017
2015.03 : Stanford -> Skydio
Past Reading
Sweet Thursday - John Steinbeck
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - George R. R. Martin
The Creative Act - Rick Rubin
Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
A Very Punchable Face - Colin Jost
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
The Door Into Summer - Robert A. Heinlein
A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas
The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson
Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson
Oathbringer - Brandon Sanderson
Rhythm of War - Brandon Sanderson
Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
A Guide to the Good Life - William B. Irvine
Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
The Alchemist -Paulo Coelho
Nonviolent Communication - Marshall Rosenberg
Projections - Karl Deisseroth
Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson
The Slow Regard of Silent Things - Patrick Rothfuss
Revelation - Russel Brand
Rogues - Neil Gaiman
Deep Work - Cal Newport
The Murmur of Bees - Sofia Segovia
Death by Meeting - Patrick Lencioni
Radical Candor - Kim Scott
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
The Manager’s Path - Camille Fournier
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Patrick Lencioni
Less - Andrew Sean Greer
Tools and Weapons - Brad Smith
Mythos - Stephen Fry
The Innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton M. Christensen
Trillion Dollar Coach - Erich Schmidt
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield
Tomorrow, When the War Began - John Marsden
What You Do Is Who You Are - Ben Horowitz
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore
Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! - Richard P. Feynman
The Master Switch - Tim Wu
Conviction - Denise Mina
City of Thieves - David Benioff
Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon
Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
I Can’t Make This Up - Kevin Hart
Billion Dollar Whale - Bradley Hope
Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Replay - Ken Grimwood
Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
The Reckoning - John Grisham
Dodge & Twist - Tony Lee
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
Disrupted - Dan Lyons
The Elephant in the Brain - Kevin Simler
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
Zero to One - Peter Thiel
The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
Places
These are the places I’ve lived in red, visited in blue, and my top wishlist in black.
