Ryan
Simpson

I’m a Computer Science student at Cal Poly Pomona and a Research Assistant at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory, where I build the perception and SLAM stack for AVL-002, the lab’s autonomous go-kart platform. My current work runs on live hardware: a custom Velodyne VLP-16 decoder at 300k+ points per second, multi-sensor RTAB-Map fusion on a Jetson AGX Orin, and ROS 2 integration across LiDAR, stereo cameras, and IMU.

Before university I built autonomous systems in Science Olympiad: an RC car with PID control and CAN bus firmware in C++ on Arduino. That experience with real hardware under real conditions shapes how I approach every system I build now: it has to work on the device, not just in simulation.