Amal Nanavati
Software Engineer at Zoox
Fremont, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAmal Nanavati is a robotics-focused software engineer with 11 years of experience bridging human-centered research and deployed autonomy, currently working on prediction metrics verification at Zoox. She earned a PhD from the University of Washington where she built end-to-end robot systems—deploying a robot-assisted feeding system in a real home, creating behavior-tree motion libraries in ROS2/MoveIt2, and learning preference-driven trajectories from crowdsourced simulations. Her work spans applied research and productization, from lowering operator-interface latency on Hello Robot’s Stretch to modeling help-seeking behavior with POMDPs that materially improved robot performance. Equally comfortable running user studies and shipping code, she has a track record of deploying robots in real-world settings (senior centers, assisted living, and field trials) and developing multimodal learning pipelines that combine video, haptics, and crowd data. Based in Fremont, CA, she brings rare depth in human-robot interaction and a pragmatic focus on systems that work for people.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of WashingtonHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Mission San Jose High SchoolBachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Japanese, Hindi
Github Skills (54)
robotics10
robot10
ada10
moveit10
ros10
hardware-interface9
robot-control9
apriltags9
http-streaming9
python9
motion-planning9
gazebo-simulator8
sdf8
perception8
fiducial-markers8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
personalrobotics/ada_feeding
Jul 2021 - Feb 2025
Robot-assisted feeding demos and projects for the ADA robot
Contributions:2 releases, 124 reviews, 193 PRs in 3 years 7 months
adaroboticspythonrobotassisted
personalrobotics/feeding_web_interface
Nov 2023 - Jan 2025
Web interface for the robot-assisted feeding system
Contributions:1 release, 9 reviews, 67 PRs in 1 year 1 month
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