Our Team

AVL members represent multiple departments across Jacob’s School of Engineering at UCSD including CSE, ECE, and MAE. With their diverse backgrounds, our members actively contribute to projects that include hardware design and synthesis, systems engineering, software engineering, perception, planning and controls.

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Dr. Henrik I. Christensen

Principal Investigator and Research Advisor

Henrik I. Christensen is the director of Robotics at UC San Diego and the Qualco

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David Paz

Project Lead

David Paz is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC San Diego’s Computer Scie

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Henry Zhang

Perception Lead

Hengyuan Zhang is a Ph.D. student at the CSE Department of UCSD working with pro

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Seth Farrell

Systems and Sensor Integration

Seth is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department

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Jing-yan Liao

Perception

Jing-Yan Liao is a master student majoring in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and

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Parthasarathi Kumar

Perception

Parthasarathi Kumar is a master’s student in the Electrical and Computer Enginee

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Zihan Zhang

Perception

Zihan is a graduate student in the Computer Science & Engineering department maj

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Varun Vupparige

Motion Planning

Varun Vupparige is a graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering sp

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Kai Chuen Tan

Motion Planning

Kai Chuen Tan is a M.Sc. Electrical and Computer Engineering student with a spec

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Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha

Perception

Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha is a Computer Science MS. student with a strong i

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Robin Wang

Behavioral Planning

Robin is a graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering department a

Dr. Henrik I. Christensen

Principal Investigator and Research Advisor

Henrik I. Christensen is the director of Robotics at UC San Diego and the Qualcomm Chancellor’s chair of robot systems. Dr. Christensen received his academic training (M.Sc and Ph.D.) from Aalborg University in Denmark. He has since then held positions at Aalborg University, University of Pennsylvania, and Georgia Tech before joining UC San Diego. Dr. Christensen does research on robotics, computer vision and AI with an emphasis on a systems approach to problems. He has published more than 350 papers and serves on multiple editorial boards. He is the Editor of Trends and Foundations in Robotics. Dr. Christensen was the editor of the US National Robotics Roadmap 2009, 2013 and 2016. He won the Joseph Engelberger Award 2011, which is the premier robotics industry award. He was also named Boeing Supplier of the Year and received an honorary doctorate (Dr. Techn. h.c.) from Aalborg University 2014. Dr. Christensen is the co-founder of multiple companies and serves as an advisor to companies, governments, and organizations across 4 continents.

  • www.hichristensen.net/
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David Paz

Project Lead

David Paz is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. While earning his B.S. in Computer Engineering and M.S. in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control at UC San Diego, he contributed to a number of research projects involving sensor development, hardware accelerators, high-performance computing, and autonomous vehicles. At the moment, he is working for the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory (AVL) at the Contextual Robotics Institute under the supervision of Dr. Henrik I. Christensen. Paz’ research involves road user trajectory prediction, intent recognition, and dynamic scene understanding to address the scalability constraints from current state of the art architectures. During his time at AVL, Paz has worked on the mapping, localization, planning and control strategies for UCSD’s self-driving mail delivery cars and has collaborated closely with members of the AVL to characterize overall AV performance and develop robust perception and simulation strategies.

  • dpazruiz@ucsd.edu | avl.ucsd.edu/dfpazr/
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Henry Zhang

Perception Lead

Hengyuan Zhang is a Ph.D. student at the CSE Department of UCSD working with professor Henrik I. Christensen. He earned his master’s degree in Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Control at the ECE Department of UCSD and Bachelor’s degree in Automation at Nanjing University. His research is in tracking and sensor fusion in Autonomous Driving. He is part of the founding team in the Autonomous Vehicle Lab and has worked on LiDAR based detection, tracking and lidar-camera fusion for object tracking and semantic mapping at AVL. He is excited about using robotics technologies to make human lives better.

  • hyzhang@ucsd.edu | www.henryzhangzhy.github.io/
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Seth Farrell

Systems and Sensor Integration

Seth is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department majoring in Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Control. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus on Machine Learning. He is currently working on systems integration for the self-driving mail delivery cars.

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Jing-yan Liao

Perception

Jing-Yan Liao is a master student majoring in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control in UCSD ECE department, and he received his Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University. The project he is currently working on is auto/semi-auto labelling project at AVL.

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Parthasarathi Kumar

Perception

Parthasarathi Kumar is a master’s student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UCSD. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics engineering from BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad and then worked as a software developer at MathWorks. He is currently working on the auto-labeling project at AVL.

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Zihan Zhang

Perception

Zihan is a graduate student in the Computer Science & Engineering department majoring in Computer Science. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. She is interested in the intersection of robotics and computer vision. She is currently working on the monocular depth estimation project at AVL.

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Varun Vupparige

Motion Planning

Varun Vupparige is a graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering specializing in Dynamics and Controls. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the RV College of Engineering. He worked as a Mechatronics Engineer at Noccarc Robotics, an early stage startup which built ICU Ventilators during COVID pandemic. He is currently working on dynamic motion planning for autonomous micro-mobility vehicles under the supervision of David Paz and Professor Henrik I. Christensen. He is passionate about impactful technologies which can better common people’s lives.

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Kai Chuen Tan

Motion Planning

Kai Chuen Tan is a M.Sc. Electrical and Computer Engineering student with a specialization in Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently working on dynamic motion planning for autonomous micro-mobility vehicles as a Graduate Research Assistant at the UCSD Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory under the supervision of David Paz and Professor Henrik I. Christensen. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with Summa Cum Laude from the Ohio State University and earned an Honor Research Distinction in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. To learn more about his work, please visit https://www.kaichuentan.ml/

  • kctan@ucsd.edu
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Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha

Perception

Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha is a Computer Science MS. student with a strong interest in autonomous systems and deep learning. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Intelligent Systems from Manipal Institute of Technology. He has experience working with various programming languages and libraries such as C++, C, Python, ROS, PyTorch, Tensorflow and has published a paper in INTERSPEECH 2020. He has worked on various projects related to 3D object detection, cross-modality registration, and has gained experience in autonomous vehicle research and open source contributions. Currently, he is working as a research assistant at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory at UCSD, where he is benchmarking 3D Object Detection models on Waymo and Argoverse2 datasets and setting up testing infrastructure on CARLA simulations. His future aims include continuing to work on cutting-edge research in the field of autonomous systems and deep learning.

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Robin Wang

Behavioral Planning

Robin is a graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UCSD. He received his bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at UC Irvine. His research focuses on building a scalable and safe planning system for autonomous vehicles that can operate in complex urban environments.

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Undergraduate Students

Evan Yao

Perception

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Shashank Venkatramani

UCSD Digital Twin

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Cynthia Tang

Simulation Environments for Autonomous Driving

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Andrew Liang

UCSD Dataset Project

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Jessica Zhong

Trajectory Prediction of Road Users

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Andres Gutierrez

UCSD Dataset Project

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Alumni

Pojung Lai

Now at Qualcomm

Po-Jung Lai received his masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering focusing on Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control. He worked on benchmarking the performance of Autonomous Vehicles at the Contextual Robotics Institute. Before he joined Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory in the Contextual Robotics Institute, he worked in WeMo Scooter as Embedded System Engineer. He holds both B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and B.S. in Finance Management from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

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Sumukha Harish

Now at Lucid Motors

Sumukha Harish comes from a Mechanical Engineering background and specialized in Control and Robotics at UCSD. He has worked on Control, Sensor Fusion, and Route Planning. Working for AVL helped him get a first-hand experience in the fields of his interest. He loves to diversify in expertise and AVL has been a great place to do that, delving himself into problems and working alongside people in different domains. The result of which, he has seen himself grow, in gaining experience and making amazing friends!

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Nathan Chan

Now at Qualcomm

Nathan Chan completed an M.S. in Computer Science at UCSD. At AVL, he contributed to the autonomous mail delivery project and campus-wide HD map definitions.

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Shawn Winston

Now at Qualcomm

Shawn received his MS in Computer Science with a focus on robotics from UCSD in the spring of 2019. Prior to this, he received his BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Shawn helped work on the global path planner for AVL and hopes to apply the skills he learned from the lab and his degree to the autonomous vehicle industry.

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Yuqing Jiang

Now at Facebook

Yuqing Jiang was a master’s student in Computer Science at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. Her work at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory involved data analytics and benchmarking for the mail delivery project.

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Qinru Li

Now at Waymo

Qinru Li was a graduate student in the Artificial Intelligence track at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He contributed to several research projects related to the development of quadruped robots, image-guided medical surgery, and autonomous vehicles. His research focus at AVL involved the enhancement of semantic scene understanding.

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Hao Xiang

Now at UCLA (PhD student)

Hao Xiang majored in Machine Learning and Data Science at UC San Diego. During his undergraduate study at Fudan University, he contributed to many machine learning-based projects involving Stereo Matching, HD Map generation, Reinforcement Learning, Few-Shot learning. At AVL, he contributed to sensor fusion to fuse information from various sensors to get more robust feature representations and semantic mapping. His research interests include Perception, Sensor fusion, Reinforcement Learning, SLAM, Optimization. Xiang is now pursuing a PhD at UCLA.

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Yunhai Han

Now at Georgia Tech (PhD student)

Yunhai Han was a graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Yanshan University in China. He took part in a number of competitions, including China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling, National Undergraduate Electronics Design Contest and RoboMaster. He learned about both hardware and software of robotics from these experiences. At AVL, Han contributed to the design and development of an auto-calibration method for autonomous vehicles when a traditional chessboard calibration is not available. He has a keen interest in robotics and hopes to make some contributions to this great community.

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Yuhan Liu

Now at Rutgers (PhD student)

Yuhan Liu was a master’s student in Computer Science at UC San Diego. While pursuing his B.S. in Electronic Information Engineering at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, he contributed to computer vision research projects involving precipitation forecasting based on radar reflectivity images and pedestrian feature recognition from surveillance videos. At AVL, Liu contributed to the design and development of an auto-calibration method for autonomous vehicles when a traditional chessboard calibration is not available.

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Dominique Meyer, PhD

LiMAR AI Inc, Founder & CEO

Dominique Meyer received his B.S. in Physics at the University of California San Diego in 2017 and earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering working with Professor Kuester and Christensen. He was part of the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative and the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, focusing on the development of imaging systems for autonomous ground and aerial vehicles. As National Geographic Young Explorer, he has led numerous expeditions to digitally document at risk cultural heritage sites around the world and is continuously passionate at applying vision systems for large scale mapping.

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Srinidhi Srinivas

Now at Autodesk Research

Srinidhi was a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department majoring in Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Control. He earned his Bachelor’s in Telecommunication engineering from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore where his thesis was Brain Computer Interface for Game Control. He worked at Analog Devices Inc. as a Senior Software Engineer for 3 years in the Automotive Infotainment division developing software frameworks for next generation infotainment platforms. At AVL his research involved road network estimation and dynamic scene modeling. He is interested about the prospects of intersection of robotics and AI.

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Parth Doshi

Now at Cruise

Parth was a CSE MS student at UCSD. His previous experience includes internships in the autonomous vehicles, robotics, and video processing domains. His work at AVL involved motion forecasting and prediction for multiple agents on the road.

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