# Rutvik Patel

> Roboticist

Location: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/rutvikpatel

I am a roboticist with demonstrated experience of working at hyper-growth startups. I am passionate about building technology-driven solutions to real-world challenges, particularly in the domains of manufacturing 🏭, agriculture 🌳 and space 🚀. I am eager to learn from mentors and peers who share my enthusiasm and vision.

My ultimate goal is to be a truly great engineer: one who can envision non-existent technologies to solve the world's greatest problems, and who possesses the technical prowess and discipline to bring those visions into reality.

## Work Experience
### Robotics Software Engineer @ Nimble
Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, CA

### Robotics Software Engineer @ GrayMatter Robotics
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Los Angeles, CA
- Architected and deployed robust robotic software for complex HMLV manufacturing, addressing high uncertainty in unstructured environments resulting in high operational uptime.
- Designed and implemented a high-precision calibration methodology for a multi-robot industrial cell, achieving a 10x improvement in accuracy (645 µm mean error).
- Spearheaded the migration of a large-scale industrial robotics platform from ROS 1 to ROS 2 to meet stringent real-time and reliability requirements, implementing lifecycle nodes for robust state management and optimizing critical data pathways.
- Prototyoed a surface reconstruction pipeline for robotic finishing tasks (e.g., sanding, grinding), achieving 1mm average error by fusing multi-sensor data to generate high-fidelity 3D models for accurate toolpath planning.

### Research Engineer @ USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Los Angeles, California, United States
- Co-developed and published a novel proactive failure prediction system for robotic lift-and-place tasks.
- Engineered a deep learning pipeline that analyzes relative object motion extracted from multi-view RGB streams using SAM2 segmentation and 2D-ICP to predict a continuous risk score,  achieving robust generalization to unseen objects in both MuJoCo simulation and real-world experiments.

### Research Assistant @ USC Viterbi Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | Los Angeles, California, United States
- Developed a physics-informed learning model to predict screw-tip dynamics, directly mitigating contact uncertainty and enhancing precision for robotic screwdriving in high-mix industrial operations. (Published in RCIM)
- Authored a novel framework for proactive failure prediction in robotic manipulation that generalizes to unseen objects by analyzing relative motion dynamics. (Published in RSS 2025)
- Reduced composite sheet layup cycle time by 50% by engineering a vision-based, adaptive motion planner for 8-DOF robots (KUKA, ABB) that integrated human expertise with data-driven learning. (Published in IEEE CASE 2024)

### Graduate Student Researcher @ USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Los Angeles, California, United States
- Improved robot controller robustness by designing a Quality-Diversity (QD) generative framework that automatically creates diverse 2D/3D environments to systematically stress-test algorithms and expose critical failure modes.
- Developed a hierarchical online planner for human-robot collaboration that proactively adapts to a person's evolving intent by modeling their perceptual limitations (field-of-view) within a custom VR simulation. (Published in IEEE ICRA 2025)

### Associate Software Engineer @ Tekion Corp
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India
- Led a front-end architecture modernization initiative, refactoring core React components and microservices while optimizing the build pipeline with Webpack to achieve a 50% performance increase.
- Engineered custom codemods to automate complex, multi-repository code refactoring, resulting in an estimated savings of over 6,400 person-hours and accelerating development cycles.
- Led and mentored a team of two interns through a full six-month project lifecycle, overseeing their contributions and fostering their growth in modern software development practices.

### Software Engineer Intern @ Tekion Corp
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Bangalore
- Developed the React-based frontend for a mission-critical release management tool, streamlining collaboration and planning between Product, Engineering, and DevOps teams.

### Python Developer Intern @ Cleveron Techworks
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Vellore Area, India
- Collaborated on a pilot project to identify medicine names from images of paper prescription. Contributed to the creation of the data set from raw images and preparing a deep learning model to extract deep features which were used further down the pipeline for medicine identification.


## Education
### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science
University of Southern California

### Bachelor of Technology - BTech in Computer Science and Engineering
Vellore Institute of Technology


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rutvik-p4t3l

---
Source: https://flows.cv/rutvikpatel
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rutvikpatel/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11