Elia Kaufmann
Senior Autonomy Engineer at Skydio
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolElia Kaufmann is a Senior Autonomy Engineer at Skydio with nine years of experience building vision-driven flight systems and a PhD in Robotics (summa cum laude) from the University of Zurich. He specializes at the intersection of machine learning, planning, and control, and helped develop the first vision-based drone racing approach that beat top human pilots head-to-head. Trained at ETH Zurich in Robotics, Systems, and Control, he blends rigorous academic research with hands-on product engineering in commercial autonomy. Based in Zurich, he has progressed from research assistant and PhD work into production autonomy roles at Skydio, demonstrating a track record of turning cutting-edge perception and planning research into robust airborne systems.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics, Summa cum laude, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics, Summa cum laude at University of ZurichBSc, Mechanical Engineering, BSc, Mechanical Engineering at ETH ZürichMSc, Robotics, Systems and Control, MSc, Robotics, Systems and Control at ETH Zurich
Github Skills (57)
robotics10
intel10
ignition10
model-predictive-control10
mpc10
camera10
predictive10
robotics-simulation10
planning10
pcl9
python9
realsense9
perception9
high-speed9
ros9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
uzh-rpg/deep_drone_acrobatics
Jun 2020 - Apr 2021
Code for the project Deep Drone Acrobatics.
Contributions:1 review, 5 commits, 1 PR in 10 months
drone
uzh-rpg/rpg_mpc
Jul 2019 - Nov 2020
Model Predictive Control for Quadrotors with extension to Perception-Aware MPC
Contributions:29 commits, 3 PRs, 12 pushes in 1 year 3 months
quadrotorsmpcreinforcement-learningmodel-predictive-controlmachine-learning
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