Carlos Peña
Research Engineer at The Bookout Center
Houston, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCarlos Peña is a research engineer with a decade of experience developing safe, optimization- and learning-driven motion planning for high degree-of-freedom robots in unstructured and partially observable environments. He combines deep academic research—PhD work at Rice on stochastic implicit neural representations, chance-constrained hierarchical planners, and robust trajectory optimization—with hands-on implementation for medical and robotic applications at The Bookout Center. His work spans algorithm design, dataset/tooling (MotionBenchMaker), and human-in-the-loop preference learning to make robot decision-making tractable under sensing uncertainty. Carlos has taught and mentored across universities and led applied projects (including AI for financial services and RoboCup teams), showing an ability to translate theory into real systems and student-ready curricula. Based in Houston, he brings a rare mix of optimization, learning, and practical systems experience that targets safe autonomy where humans and noisy sensors coexist.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Rice UniversityUniversidad de los Andes
Spanish, English
Github Skills (12)
minecraft10
moveit10
ompl10
motion-planning10
mocap10
manipulation9
trajectory-generation9
ros9
pybullet9
robotics9
del8
robocup6
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
carlosquinterop/ros-pacman
Jul 2018 - Nov 2019
Contributions:1 release, 110 commits, 6 pushes in 1 year 4 months
carlosquinterop/BasicMotion
May 2018 - Apr 2019
Contributions:22 commits, 11 pushes in 11 months
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