# Karan Chawla > Engineer and Leader | Robotics and distributed systems Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/karanchawla An experienced autonomy software engineer with a passion for solving hard technological problems at the intersection of people and software. In the past, Karan has developed motion planning and computer vision software for autonomous helicopters, drones, and ag-robots. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Zipline Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Lead Software Engineer, Simulation @ Elroy Air Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area 1. Spearheaded the development and execution of a comprehensive simulation and infrastructure road map, aligning it with company-wide milestones and program goals resulting in the world’s first hybrid electric drone flight in Nov ‘23. 2. Led cross-functional collaboration between flight software, control systems, and testing teams, ensuring successful deployment of critical systems on production vehicles. 3. Designed a cloud-native software and autonomy qualification framework that parallelized 100+ test scenarios, reducing qualification time from months to days and uncovering 20+ critical edge cases. 4. Architected and implemented a custom configuration management system that enabled tight configuration control and management for flight testing. ### Autonomy Software Engineer @ Elroy Air Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area 1. Developed and implemented critical flight systems, including a hierarchical state machine-based mode manager for flight software. 2.Developed a behavior planner for ground taxi and cargo pick-up that added ‘behaviors’ such as triangulating a cargo pod, navigating and aligning with the cargo pod, and navigating to a predetermined GPS location. ### Co-Founder & CTO @ Resolute Labs Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area 1. Led the development of a cloud-native web application for energy infrastructure inspection, showcasing ability to identify market opportunities and build innovative solutions. 2. Interfaced visual and IR cameras with 6-DOF IMU to transform traditional aircraft inspections into digital patrols. 3. Successfully raised seed funding from Alchemist Accelerator, gaining valuable experience in venture fundraising and B2B startup operations. ### Autonomy Engineer @ SkyRyse Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area 1. Developed a Hardware-In-The-Loop simulation for the company's R-44 General Aviation Helicopter platform by interfacing the aircraft sensors with X-Plane and Matlab. 2. Implemented accurate ground detection capabilities for the company's aircraft by integrating a laser altimeter into the vertical position solution. The efforts included firmware development, as well as the integration into the overall system and ground detection logic. 3. Designed the guidance logic for autonomous take-off, landing, and Mission Task Elements while supporting flight tests from the co-pilot seat as a Flight Test Engineer. 4. Developed, trained, and tested edge-AI visual perception system using an RGB camera for landing site obstacle detection. ### Research And Teaching Assistant @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Area 1. Teaching assistant for "Autonomous Decision Making in Real World" within the Computer Science department at UIUC. Held weekly office hours, graded assignments, and helped students with projects. 2. Research Assistant at DASLab where I worked on GPS denied under canopy navigation for phenotyping robots. ### Robotics Software Developer Intern @ FarmWise Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area 1. Developed a simulation environment for testing robot software using ROS and Gazebo. 2. Implemented EKF for state estimation which fused data from the GPS, wheel encoders, and monocular visual odometry. 3. Developed and test visual row following algorithms and tested them on farms in California. ### Aerospace Research Intern @ National University of Singapore Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Singapore ### Summer Research Intern @ Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 The aim was to develop a system and control model of a VTOL tilt tri-rotor UAV that was a hybrid of a tricopter and an inverted V tail fixed wing aircraft. 1. Developed a dynamic non-linear 12DOF model in MATLAB of the fixed wing aircraft. Modelled the VTOL in both hover and cruise modes and developed a transition controller for the transition flight regime. 2. The intermediate control strategy was to use sigmoid functions for different variables and smoothly transition between hover and cruise. 3. Used methods such as cascade PID control, decoupling transformation and position control techniques to control the aircraft and tested model in Simulink. ### Mechanical Design Engineer @ AERXLABS Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 The goal was to design a drone for delivery of medicines within a 15km range with a maximum payload of 2kg. 1. Worked with a product designer to design an octacopter which started with iterative weight estimation followed by selection of components. 2. Developed a 12DOF model of the octacopter in the Simulink which described the dynamics of the system. 3.The purpose of the dynamic model was to develop a PID controller for the system. To avoid wind-up errors, the integral term is only switched on once the controller is in the desired steady state. 4. Implemented Extremum Seeking algorithm to tune the PID parameters for the system. ### Design Engineer @ VuYoo Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Silicon Valley The goal was to design a water proof drone capable of autonomously following surfers while satisfying requirements of 40 minutes of flight time and an All-Up Weight of less than 1.6kg. 1. Solved heating issues for the electronics that were caused due to water proofing. 2. Was also responsible with directly dealing with the vendors to ensure that the cost is <$1200 while ensuring the drone is user friendly and has great aesthetics. ### Summer Intern @ Bharat Forge Ltd Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 The aim was to study the manufacturing process of Mud-Pump crankshafts. 1. Determined bottlenecks in the manufacturing process at MudPump crankshaft line using principles of lean manufacturing. 2. Suggested changes to improve the net productivity of the whole process like a change in the placement of the machines to save time in moving the crankshaft using crane. ## Education ### Master of Science (MS) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 ### Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani Jan 2012 – Jan 2016 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/thekaranchawla - Website: https://karanchawla.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/karanchawla JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/karanchawla/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23