Hi! I’m a roboticist living in San Francisco. I lead the autonomy group at Skydio, where we build the best drones in the world for consumers and industry. Our team holds the state of the art in robust visual localization, obstacle avoidance, and motion planning to create trustworthy and intelligent machines that delight, lower costs, and save lives in complex and unknown scenarios.

More generally, I have a keen interest in computer vision, deep learning, nonlinear optimization, systems architecture, and symbolic computation. I was born in Armenia and grew up in Alaska before studying at Princeton and Stanford. In my free time I enjoy playing guitars and drums, traveling, soccer, bughouse, and flying things.

News

2019.11 : Thanks to Vladimir Nekrasov for a fanstastic internship improving our obstacle avoidance system.
2019.10 : Skydio Dock announced to commercial markets.
2019.10 : Skydio 2 launches to the world, sells out in 48 hours!
2019.05 : Cheers to Greg Kahn for a great research internship!
2019.04 : Skydio autonomy invited to workshops @ ICRA (1, 2), RSS, and CVPR
2018.10 : R1 lands in Apple retail stores and Amazon!
2018.09 : Skydio announces SDK to build apps for flying cameras
2018.08 : LentinkLab + BDML + Skydio awared DESI basic research grant
2018.08 : We had seven great autonomy interns this summer. Special shout out to the talented Somil Bansal.
2018.02 : Skydio R1 launches as the first fully autonomous drone!
2017.07 : End-to-End Geometry and Context for Deep Stereo Regression is a Spotlight Oral @ ICCV!
                 Thanks to Alex Kendall for his awesome work.
2015.03 : Stanford -> Skydio

Events

2018.11 : Guest Lecture, 16.485 - Visual Navigation (Luca Carlone) @ MIT
2018.11 : Guest Lecture, CS 287 - Advanced Robotics (Pieter Abbeel @ Berkeley)
2019.11 : PNT Symposium 2019 @ Stanford
2019.10 : SF Drones Meetup @ Bolt SF
2019.06 : Embedded Vision Workshop @ CVPR 2019
2019.03 : SF Robotics Showcase @ Bloomberg
2018.12 : Guest Lecture, 16.S398 - Visual Navigation (Luca Carlone) @ MIT
2018.11 : Guest Lecture, AA 248E - Aerial Robotics (David Lentink) @ Stanford
2018.08 : Guest Lecture, AE 483 - Navigation and Control (Grace Gao) @ UIUC
2018.03 : AI Workshop @ NYCDFF
2018.03 : ZEDtalk @ Zoox
2018.03 : Speaker @ Society of Artificers
2017.12 : Tech Talk, SUAVE @ Stanford
2017.11 : GRASP Special Seminar @ UPenn
2017.11 : Robotics Seminar @ Princeton
2017.06 : Skydio Research Deep Dive @ CVPR 2017

Recent Reading

Conviction - Denise Mina
City of Thieves - David Benioff
Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon
Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
I Can’t Make This Up - Kevin Hart
Billion Dollar Whale - Bradley Hope
Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Replay - Ken Grimwood
Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
The Reckoning - John Grisham
Dodge & Twist - Tony Lee
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
Disrupted - Dan Lyons
The Elephant in the Brain - Kevin Simler
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
Zero to One - Peter Thiel
The Dark Tower I-VII - Stephen King
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer

Places

I am a fan of travel and time in hostels. Below are the places I’ve lived in red, visited in blue, and my top wishlist in black.