Karthik C Lakshmanan

September 2021 - now: Perception Lead at Zipline

I lead the perception team working on the "Droid" - part of Zipline's next generation delivery platform that enables safe, precise and magical deliveries (check out this short video by Mark Rober!).
My team owns both onboard and offboard perception - developing and deploying machine learning algorithms, data and ground truth pipelines, as well as triage and evaluation tools.
Previously, I led tracker development on the Acoustic Detect And Avoid program. Our system received FAA authorization for the first ever BVLOS deliveries in the US.

As a founding engineer at Aurora, I helped bring up a broad swath of the self driving stack in the early days.
I subsequently became a Technical Lead Manager on the perception team, leading teams on various object detection and tracking efforts. My day to day involved experiment design, ML model development, onboard integration, visualization and evaluation.
I also led perception bring-up on several platforms, from cars to trucks.
I helped found Jumpstart - Aurora's Returnship program to help bring women back into the workforce after a career gap.

I owned object tracking and evaluation pipelines for urban autonomous driving. Our work on vehicle tracking from lidar was awarded a US patent.

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