Nathan Kau
Co-Founder & CEO at Dream Robotics Inc
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inAutonomous Robotics and Simulation Technology
Nathan Kau is a robotics engineer with 12 years of hands-on experience building agile hardware and intelligent control systems, based in Palo Alto. He led and helped publish Stanford Doggo, an influential open-source quadruped project, and served as embedded systems engineer on the StanfordQuadruped repo improving control, calibration, and hardware interfaces. Nathan blends research and product work—from AI+robotics roles at X and Woven Planet to eVTOL and UAV prototyping—and co-created Stanford’s CS 123 course to teach AI-enabled robotics. He co-founded MakeX, bringing maker education to students, and is currently founding a stealth AI startup while working at Dream Robotics. Known for making things move reliably, he pairs rigorous mechanical design with practical ML and embedded systems know-how that spans simulation to field demos. An unexpected thread through his career is turning student projects into enduring, widely used resources that accelerate robotics research and education.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University
Github Skills (8)
configuration-management10
embedded10
servo-controller10
robotics10
kinematics10
sys10
python10
hardware-interface10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
stanfordroboticsclub/StanfordQuadruped
Feb 2019 - Dec 2022
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 114 commits, 5 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Nathan contributed significantly to the `stanfordroboticsclub/stanfordquadruped` repository, focusing on the robot's control and hardware interfaces. Their work included updates to the installation script (`install.sh`), adding service configurations and fixing linking issues. Furthermore, they modified configuration files (`Config.py`, `HardwareInterface.py`, `HardwareConfig.py`) and kinematics code to optimize the robot's movements. The user also worked on calibration, including modifying a servo calibration script.
Nate711/propscript
Sep 2013 - Jun 2014
Contributions:24 commits in 9 months
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