Chao Qu - Software Engineer at Skydio

Chao Qu

Software Engineer at Skydio

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

Chao Qu is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in pose estimation and autonomy, currently driving Pose, Autonomy work at Rivian after earlier autonomy roles at Skydio and a PhD in CIS from the University of Pennsylvania. He combines academic rigor—published research in visual and lidar odometry and a dissertation on fusing visual odometry with deep-learning depth completion—with three years of industry autonomy experience building production perception stacks. A pragmatic C++ and back-end contributor to notable open-source robotics tooling like Symforce, he focuses on performance, modernizing code, and robust code generation for nonlinear optimization. Based in California, he brings a rare mix of research depth and hands-on systems engineering in vehicle and drone autonomy, with roots in automotive engineering and precision agriculture applications.

4 years of coding experience

Github Skills (7)

c-language10

cprogramming-language10

optimization10

code-generation9

robotics8

symbolic-computation8

eigen7

Programming languages (2)

C++Python

Github contributions (5)

symforce-org/symforce

Nov 2022 - Jan 2023

Fast symbolic computation, code generation, and nonlinear optimization for robotics

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:22 reviews, 12 commits, 5 PRs in 1 month

Contributions summary:Chao primarily contributed to the Symforce project by optimizing code and refactoring existing functionality. Their work involved improving performance by reducing functor copies in factor creation and using more efficient C++ features. They also addressed build and linting issues by updating code to use more modern C++ standards. Additionally, the user modified the code generation to resolve issues related to the "compose_with_point" function.

code-generationnonlinear-optimizationroboticssymbolic-computationpython

chao-qu-skydio/imgui_example

Nov 2022 - Oct 2023

Contributions:12 pushes in 11 months

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