Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sept 2019 - June 2023
  • University of California, Los Angeles – Samueli School of Engineering
  • Dissertation: “Fast and Adaptive Geometric Robot Perception”
• M.S., Electrical Engineering, Sept 2017 - June 2018
  • University of California, San Diego – Jacobs School of Engineering
  • Thesis: “Continuous Behavior Acquisition in Clinical Environments”
• B.S., Electrical Engineering, Sept 2013 - June 2017
  • University of California, San Diego – Jacobs School of Engineering

Professional Experience

• [Full-time] Technical Lead, Autonomy - Localization & Mapping, Oct 2024 - Present
  • Cyngn (Menlo Park, CA)
• [Full-time] Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy - Localization & Mapping, Feb 2024 - Oct 2024
  • Cyngn (Menlo Park, CA)
• [Full-time] Senior Robotics Software Engineer - SLAM, Sept 2023 - Jan 2024
  • Exyn Technologies (Philadelphia, PA)
• [Internship] Year-Round Internship Program, July 2021 - Sept 2021
  • NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, CA)
• [Full-time] Software Engineer - Computer Vision, Oct 2018 - Aug 2019
  • HRL Laboratories (Malibu, CA)
• [Part-time] COSMOS Robotics Teaching Assistant, May 2017 - Aug 2017
  • UC San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
• [Internship] Electronics & Payloads Technical Intern, June 2016 - Sept 2016
  • Northrop Grumman Corporation (Melbourne, FL)
• [Part-time] Contractor - Robotics Engineer, Oct 2015 - June 2016
  • SPAWAR Systems Center - Pacific (San Diego, CA)
• [Internship] Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP), June 2015 - Sept 2015
  • SPAWAR Systems Center - Pacific (San Diego, CA)

Research Experience

• Graduate Student Researcher, Sept 2021 - June 2023
  • Verifiable & Control-Theoretic Robotics (VECTR) Laboratory, UCLA (Westwood, CA)
  • Advisor: Dr. Brett Lopez
• Graduate Student Researcher, Sept 2019 - June 2021
  • Laboratory for Embedded Machines and Ubiquitous Robots (LEMUR), UCLA (Westwood, CA)
  • Advisor: Dr. Ankur Mehta
• University Collaborator, March 2020 - July 2021
  • Team CoSTAR, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, CA)
  • Advisors: Dr. Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi and Dr. Brett Lopez
• Graduate Student Researcher, Sept 2017 - June 2018
  • Translational Neuroengineering Laboratory (TNEL), UC San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
  • Advisor: Dr. Vikash Gilja
• ECE Summer Research Internship Program (SRIP), June 2017 - Sept 2017
  • Translational Neuroengineering Laboratory (TNEL), UC San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
  • Advisor: Dr. Vikash Gilja
• Undergraduate Student Researcher, Dec 2013 - June 2017
  • Translational Neuroengineering Laboratory (TNEL), UC San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
  • Advisor: Dr. Vikash Gilja

Honors and Awards

• ICRA 2023 RAS Travel Grant
• UCLA Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Fellowship
• UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department Fellowship
• Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 Finalist
• UC San Diego Provost’s and Warren College Honors

Technical Skills

• Hardware: fast prototyping, sensor calibration, sensor synchronization
• Software: C/C++, Python, MATLAB; ROS, PCL, OpenCV; tmux + (neo)vim
• Algorithms: sensor fusion, state estimation, 3D mapping, SLAM

Academic Services

• Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2023
• Reviewer for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021, 2022, 2023
• Reviewer for IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022, 2023
• Reviewer for IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021, 2022, 2023
• Reviewer for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2021
• Reviewer for Signal, Image and Video Processing, 2023
• SoCal Robotics Symposium Organization Committee, 2020

Media Appearances

• “UCLA Engineers Unveil Algorithm for Robotic Sensing and Movement,” UCLA Samueli Newsroom, 18 July 2023. URL

Journal Articles

• K. Chen, R. Nemiroff, and B.T. Lopez, “Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping: Perceptive and Connective SLAM,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.01843, 2023.
• K. Chen, B.T. Lopez, A. Agha-mohammadi, and A. Mehta, “Direct LiDAR Odometry: Fast Localization with Dense Point Clouds,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 2000-2007, April 2022, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3142739. Presented at ICRA 2022, Philadelphia, PA.
• T.K. Chang, K. Chen, A. Mehta, “Resilient and Consistent Multirobot Cooperative Localization with Covariance Intersection,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 197-208, Feb. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2021.3104965.
• P. Gabriel, K. Chen, A. Alasfour, T. Pailla, W.K. Doyle, O. Devinsky, D. Friedman, P. Dugan, L. Melloni, T. Thesen, D. Gonda, S. Sattar, S. Wang, and V. Gilja, “Neural Correlates of Unstructured Motor Behaviors,” Journal of Neural Engineering, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 066026, 2019, doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/ab355c.
• K. Chen, P. Gabriel, A. Alasfour, C. Gong, W.K. Doyle, O. Devinsky, D. Friedman, L. Melloni, T. Thesen, D. Gonda, S. Sattar, S. Wang, and V. Gilja, “Patient-Specific Pose Estimation in Clinical Environments,” IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, vol. 6, pp. 1-11, 2018, no. 2101111, doi: 10.1109/JTEHM.2018.2875464.

Conference Papers

• R. Nemiroff, K. Chen, and B.T. Lopez, “Joint On-Manifold Gravity and Accelerometer Intrinsics Estimation,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Detroit, MI, USA, 2023, pp. 1388-1394, doi: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342424.
• K. Chen, R. Nemiroff, and B.T. Lopez, “Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry: Lightweight LIO with Continuous-Time Motion Correction,” IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), London, United Kingdom, 2023, pp. 3983-3989, doi: 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160508.
• A. Bouman, J. Ott, S.K. Kim, K. Chen, M. Kochenderfer, B.T. Lopez, A. Agha-mohammadi, and J. Burdick, “Adaptive Coverage Path Planning for Efficient Exploration of Unknown Environments,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, Oct 2022, pp. 11916-11923, doi: 10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982287.
• K. Chen, A. Pogue, B.T. Lopez, A. Agha-mohammadi, and A. Mehta, “Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning with Integrated Intrinsics and Spatio-Temporal Constraints,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Prague, Czech Republic, Oct 2021, pp. 2451-2458, doi: 10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636030.
• A. Schperberg*, K. Chen*, S. Tsuei, M. Jewett, J. Hooks, S. Soatto, A. Mehta, and D. Hong, “Risk-Averse MPC via Visual-Inertial Input and Recurrent Networks for Online Collision Avoidance,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, NV, USA, Oct 2020, pp. 5730-5737, doi: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341070. *Indicates equal contribution

Workshops, Posters, and Other Presentations

• K. Chen, R. Nemiroff, and B.T. Lopez, “Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry with Pose Graph Optimization,” Robotic Perception and Mapping: Emerging Techniques, ICRA 2022 Workshop, Philadelphia, PA, May 2022. URL
• K. Chen, P. Gabriel, A. Alasfour, W.K. Doyle, O. Devinsky, D. Friedman, T. Thesen, and V. Gilja, “Patient-Specific Pose Estimation in a Clinical Environment,” SoCal Machine Learning Symposium, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, 2017. URL
• P. Gabriel, K. Chen, D. Gonda, S. Sattar, V. Gilja, and S. Wang, “Quantify Motor Semiology in the Pediatric Epilepsy Monitoring Unit using RGB-D Sensors,” American Epilepsy Society Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 2017.
• P. Gabriel, A. Alasfour, K. Chen, W.K. Doyle, D. Friedman, T. Thesen, and V. Gilja, “Neural Correlates to Automatic Behavior Estimations from RGB-D Video in Epilepsy Unit,” Research Expo, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, La Jolla, CA, 2016.
• K. Chen and J. Larson, “RadarNav: Towards an Autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicle,” Team Internship Program Expo, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, La Jolla, 2015.

Dissertation / Thesis

• K.J. Chen, “Fast and Adaptive Geometric Robot Perception,” University of California Los Angeles, 2023. URL
• K.J. Chen, “Continuous Behavior Acquisition in Clinical Environments,” University of California San Diego, 2018. URL