# Stefan Zhu > Planning @ Waymo Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/stefanzhu ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Waymo Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area High-level motion planning for autonomous driving ### Senior Software Engineer @ Atomic Machines Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | Berkeley, California, United States Robotic manufacturing of MEMS ### Perception Software Engineer @ Embark Trucks Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 Sensor Fusion, Online Calibration, Odometry, Mapping & Localization for self-driving truck ### Software Engineer Intern - Perception @ Embark Trucks Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area • Designed and implemented point cloud filtering algorithms that significantly improved the quality of the lidar lane maps. The existing porous lane map was completely filled up without introducing false lane lines. • Created a C++ ROS package that automatically detects lidar and camera sensor anomalies such as blurriness and occlusions. All algorithms tested extensively. ### Research Assistant -Prof William (Red) L. Whittaker @ Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Greater Pittsburgh Area • Created an acoustic odometry solution for the nuclear pipe inspection robot. • Developed a tethered mobile robot for rescuing nuclear inspection robot in the case when the inspection robot gets trapped in the pipe during an inspection. ### Research Assistant -Prof Howie Choset @ Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2016 – Jan 2020 | Greater Pittsburgh Area • Led a research group on creating a computational design tool for passive compliant gripper. • Created an inverse-dynamic controller for the hyper-redundant modular snake robot. • Conducted research on vehicle suspension systems. Designed a double-wishbone suspension system for robot mobile base. • Analyzed power transmission system for fast AGV to achieve maximized motor efficiency and torque output. • Created a 3D virtual robotics testing environment using Solidworks and Gazebo. • Designed components for the hyperredundant modular snake robot ### Course Assistant @ Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 Course Assistant of 16-311 (Introduction to Robotics). Held regular office hours. Helped design and set up labs. ### Robotics Software Engineer Intern @ Brain Corp Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Diego, California • Fully integrated a depth camera to the scrubber robot’s perception and mapping stack. Enhanced the robot’s obstacle avoidance capability. • Developed a calibration pipeline by minimizing error between depth camera point cloud and lidar point cloud. • Modified sensor ROS package to enable filters for cleaner sensor data. • Performed various KPI testings to evaluate the sensor’s ability to detect various obstacles. ### R&D Mechatronics Engineer Intern @ HP Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater San Diego Area • Created an automated vision inspection tool. Tool performs machine vision inspection with a monochrome camera. • Wrote the software package for the tool in Python using OOP structure. Software performs hardware control, image processing, and data storage. Final system reduced the part inspection time from hours to 5 minutes. • Designed a high precision compression study jig which enables engineers to repetitively exert micron level compression to a part to understand the part’s behavior under various levels of compression. ### Mechatronics Engineer Intern @ BITO Robotics Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 • Designed a high mobility multi-terrain tracked robot that has compliant road wheels. • Created an automated robot battery swapping system. Fully designed the system,including a 3 DOF manipulator. Gained experience in precision linear actuation design. • Prototyped a modular sensor pod for an IMU,a Lidar and a camera. The sensor pod is self-powered and could be easily mounted on robots for SLAM testing. ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Robotic Systems Development Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science ### Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering & Robotics Carnegie Mellon University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zheyao-zhu --- Source: https://flows.cv/stefanzhu JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/stefanzhu/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11