Michael Kaca
Drone Autonomy at DoorDash
South San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Kaca is a robotics and autonomy engineer with nine years of experience building advanced perception, navigation, and embedded systems across startups and moonshot labs. Currently working on drone autonomy at DoorDash, he previously co-founded Olden Labs to commercialize AI-enabled smart-cage systems that accelerate pre-clinical research, blending product development with distributed systems and IoT. His background spans end-to-end robot development at Cobalt, Apple, X, and Tesla, with deep hands-on skills in SLAM, sensor fusion, C++, Python, ROS, and rapid prototyping. Michael pairs systems-level architecture and safety-minded optimization with practical bring-up and deployment experience, having shipped multiple products and led cross-functional teams. He holds an MS in Computer Science (Robotics & Computational Perception) from Georgia Tech and a BASc in Mechatronics from Waterloo, and is comfortable moving between hardware, firmware, and cloud-connected robotics stacks. An underrated strength is his track record of turning research-grade sensors and algorithms into reliable, manufacturable systems under real-world constraints.
9 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Research Assistant, Research Assistant at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaster of Science - MS Computer Science with Specialization in Robotics and Computational Perception, Master of Science - MS Computer Science with Specialization in Robotics and Computational Perception at Georgia Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Applied Science - BASc Honors Mechanical Engineering with Mechatronics Specialization - Co-operative Program, Bachelor of Applied Science - BASc Honors Mechanical Engineering with Mechatronics Specialization - Co-operative Program at University of Waterloo
English, Polish, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
robot10
calibration10
gazebo-simulator10
controlling9
ros9
robotics9
ignition8
reflex8
gazebosim8
robot-control7
controller7
pybullet6
sensor4
astra2
slam-algorithms1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
mkaca/MURGit
Nov 2017 - Jun 2018
Contributions:25 pushes, 1 branch in 7 months
mkaca/graceful_controller
Jan 2022 - Sep 2022
A better local controller for ROS Navigation.
Contributions:2 pushes, 3 branches in 8 months
controllerros2ros-navigationrosnavigation
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