# Sherry (Xiaoyi) Chen > Senior Robotics Software Engineer @ Chef Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/sherryxiaoyichen I’m a senior robotics engineer with deep experience in planning, controls, and deploying real robots in production, and an increasing focus on ML-driven robot policies. At Chef Robotics, I joined as an early engineer and helped scale a fleet of 50+ deployed robots that have produced 70M+ meals. I’ve built core decision-making, motion planning, and manipulation algorithms, and more recently led ML-oriented projects including PointNet-based pick-weight prediction, LLM-guided manipulation tuning, and ACT/π₀ imitation-learning prototypes on research arms. Before Chef, I worked on the ML Planner team at Nuro, integrating learned pedestrian/vehicle interaction models, building safety-critical planning logic, and developing benchmark and simulation systems for interactive autonomous driving. My academic background is in reinforcement learning and multi-agent interaction — I published first-author work at ICRA 2021 on attention-based RL for urban driving — and I’ve continued exploring robot learning on my own hardware, including recent ACT experiments with 90%+ success. Beyond engineering, I stay active in the community as a reviewer (ICRA, RA-L, RAS), workshop organizer (RSS), and mentor (Women in Robotics, .406 Ventures). I’ve also explored entrepreneurship through On Deck, Grishin Robotics, and past projects like UCheck. I’m passionate about deploying learned robot behaviors in the real world, and I’m excited about opportunities at the intersection of robotics systems and modern robot learning models. Portfolio: https://sherrychen1120.github.io/ ## Work Experience ### Senior Robotics Software Engineer @ Chef Robotics Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Tech Lead @ Chef Robotics Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Robotics Software Engineer @ Chef Robotics Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Working with a rockstar team to reduce the cost of fresh food using robotics. We are hiring! https://chefrobotics.ai/careers ### Advisor @ SyntheticFi Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Founder @ Nirva Labs Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 We are an organization with a mission to accelerate the fight against climate change with AI and robotics. A group of roboticists and AI researchers passionate about bridging the gap between robotics and climate solutions, our goal is to motivate more engineers and entrepreneurs to join climate robotics and accelerate the benefits of robotics in addressing climate change. We publish articles regularly on climate robotics startups and projects and analysis of the climate robotics landscape. We also offer robotics and ML advisory for climate projects in need of automation. If you are working on something cool or simply have a good idea for climate robotics, feel free to reach out! ### Software Engineer (Robotics) II @ Nuro Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Mountain View, California, United States - Analyze failure modes for decision-making around pedestrians and cyclists. Drive discussions and brainstorms for improvements. - Create OKRs and work plans for the team. ### Software Engineer (Robotics) @ Nuro Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Mountain View, California, United States - Design, implement and test interactive decision-making algorithms for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles. - Build the evaluation pipeline for behavior around pedestrians. - Integrate Machine Learning model outputs with the planning stack while maintaining safety guarantees. - Lead and coordinate cross-team discussions and drive decisions. ### Researcher, General Robotics Automation Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab @ University of Pennsylvania Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States MIDAS: Multi-agent Interaction-aware Decision-making with Adaptive Strategies for Urban Autonomous Navigation • MIDAS is a reinforcement learning algorithm where the ego-agent learns to affect other agents’ actions in urban driving scenarios, using an attention-mechanism to handle an arbitrary number of other agents. • Published at ICRA 2021. Advised by Prof.Pratik Chaudhari. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9561148 https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07081 ### Software Engineer @ Nuro Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Mountain View, California Implemented simulation for vehicle dynamics and control. Designed tests to prevent future regression. ### Electrical & Software Lead @ S.S. MAPR Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater Philadelphia Area * Awards: 2019 Cornell Cup Grand Prize; UPenn Mechanical Engineering Judges' Choice Award. * Autonomous surface vehicle for multi-depth water quality sampling and measuring, built on mbed LPC1768 and Raspberry Pi. Team of 6 (3 mechanical, 3 electrical & software) * Designed, built and tested the electrical hardware and software together with 2 other electrical teammates. Autonomy stack composed of Kalman Filter based localization and a PID controller. Control system for onboard components built with C++ and mbed RTOS. Remote control system built with Python. * Reduced the measuring and sampling costs by 73% and 83%, respectively. This will allow water authorities to measure 4x more frequently and sample 5x more frequently, thus reducing the time gap for finding water quality problems close to the river bed from 1 year down to 6 days. ### Data Scientist @ Facebook Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Menlo Park, California • ML modeling: Implemented model to predict bad accounts for Business Integrity team. Undertook target definition, feature engineering & out-of-time testing. Automated model training & testing in Python & SQL. • Impact: Increased recall by 6X at same precision. Decreased bad impression metric by 3.8%. • Metric Support: Optimized queries & table structures for new team metric to simplify analysis. Built pipelines and dashboards on top of Presto & Hive. ### Co-Founder @ UCheck Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Philadelphia • Self-checkout app for urban grab & go stores. • Built iOS app in Swift & Firebase. Developed Venmo payment & verification with Braintree API & Node.js. • Awards: Wharton Innovation Fund, CURF Research Fellowship. ### Data Scientist @ Facebook Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Menlo Park, California • Data Analytics & Engineering: Defined metrics for order of actions on Pages. Built pipelines for future UX design decisions in Python & SQL. • Impact: Metrics & pipelines used during Pages re-design in 2017 H2. ## Education ### Master's degree in Computer Science University of Pennsylvania ### Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering University of Pennsylvania ### Bachelor's degree in Management (Entrepreneurship) The Wharton School ### High School Diploma Shanghai High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sherryxychen - Website: https://sherrychen1120.github.io/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/sherryxiaoyichen JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sherryxiaoyichen/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01