Pratik Agarwal
Director, Head Of Onboard Autonomy at Cruise Automation, Inc.
Pleasanton, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPratik Agarwal is an AI and robotics leader with 13+ years of hands-on experience building perception, prediction, and end-to-end driving models for production autonomous vehicles at Waymo, Nuro, Coco, Cruise and now GM. He combines deep research pedigree (PhD in AI Robotics and 1300+ citations) with product-driven delivery—shipping safety-critical emergency braking and the world’s first driverless deployment at Waymo, leading Nuro’s multi-state unmanned rollouts, and deploying unified ML planners at Cruise. Pratik has scaled teams and systems from founding-engineer scrappiness to 100+ engineer orgs, inventing a 3-stage pretrain→fine-tune→distill pipeline to fit foundation models onto onboard compute. He is also an active contributor to core robotics tooling (notably enhancements to the g2o graph-optimization framework), reflecting a low-level systems fluency alongside ML research. Based in Pleasanton, he advises and invests in robotics startups across delivery, underwater, and food-shopping automation, often turning lean prototypes into city-scale pilots. Pragmatic about safety and commercialization, he blends academic rigor with operator-focused engineering to move autonomy from lab demos to public roads.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science and Engg (MSE), Computer Science, Master of Science and Engg (MSE), Computer Science at University of MichiganPhD, AI Robotics, PhD, AI Robotics at University of FreiburgBachelor of Engineering (BE), Computer Science, Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Computer Science at Manipal Institute of Technology
Github Skills (9)
graph10
c-language10
cpp10
cprogramming-language10
optimisation10
optimization10
g2o10
cmake9
linear-algebra8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (4)
RainerKuemmerle/g2o
Oct 2012 - Mar 2015
g2o: A General Framework for Graph Optimization
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 1 push, 1 comment in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Pratik primarily contributed to the core graph optimization framework, g2o. Their work included modifying CMake modules for finding and integrating g2o, and merging updates from the remote master branch. Furthermore, they implemented and added new features by adding new robust kernels and new edge types within the framework. These additions highlight their focus on improving the optimization capabilities and extending the functionality of the g2o library.
roboticsoptimizationc-plus-plusgraph-optimizationg2o
agpratik/max-mixture
Oct 2012 - Mar 2014
Contributions:13 commits in 1 year 5 months
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