Helen Oleynikova
Senior Researcher at ETH Zürich
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHelen Oleynikova is a senior researcher and robotics engineer with 12 years of experience building perception-to-action systems that work reliably in the real world. Based in Zurich and helping lead ETH Zürich's Mobile Robotics Lab, she combines academic rigor (PhD in Robotics) with industry experience at NVIDIA and Microsoft, focusing on mapping, planning, and sensor integration for UAVs and mobile robots. Her open-source contributions span high-impact projects such as PX4 autopilot, Azure Kinect ROS drivers, and GPU-accelerated nvblox, reflecting a pragmatic attention to code quality, simulation, and trajectory optimization. She repeatedly bridges research and production—implementing voxblox-based MAV planners, integrating VICON logging into autopilots, and adapting Gazebo simulators for advanced multi-DOF trajectories—so her work reduces the gap between prototypes and deployed robotic systems. Notably, she blends low-level embedded work with high-level planning, making her equally comfortable adding license headers for reproducible experiments and designing skeleton-graph planners for aggressive flight.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Engineering with a Concentration in Robotics, Bachelor's degree, Engineering with a Concentration in Robotics at Franklin W. Olin College of EngineeringDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering (Robotics), Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering (Robotics) at ETH Zürich
Github Skills (30)
robotics10
c-language10
px410
licensing10
gazebosim10
python10
simulator10
azure-kinect10
mavlink10
trajectory-optimization10
computer-vision10
pathfinding10
cprogramming-language10
ros10
gazebo-simulator10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
nvidia-isaac/nvblox
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
A GPU-accelerated TSDF and ESDF library for robots equipped with RGB-D cameras.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 22 commits, 9 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Helen primarily focused on fixing code by adding missing license headers to multiple Python files, including experiment and visualization scripts. These changes suggest a focus on code quality and adherence to project standards. The files modified indicate a role in maintaining and possibly extending the functionality of the experiments and visualization tools related to the nvblox library.
nvidia-dockerrgb-dgpuacceleratedrgb
ethz-asl/mav_voxblox_planning
Jul 2018 - May 2019
MAV planning tools using voxblox as the map representation.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:220 commits, 16 PRs, 65 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Helen primarily worked on the `rrt_planner_voxblox` project. The commits involved adding features for MAV planning tools using voxblox as the map representation. They implemented path smoothing using loco and polynomial smoothers and added a skeleton graph planner, suggesting a focus on path planning and trajectory optimization within a robotics project. The commits show integration with libraries like `mav_trajectory_generation` and collision checking with voxblox.
representationroboticsvoxbloxmapmav
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