Robotics Software Engineer
Ryan
Simpson
Research at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory, Cal Poly Pomona. Perception, SLAM, and sensor fusion on AVL-002.
Selected Work
03 projects
About
Cal Poly Pomona
CS — Class of 2028
AVL Lab
Research Assistant
Jul 2025 – Present
Science Olympiad
San Dimas HS
2022 – 2024
I build software that closes the gap between sensor data and robot action.
I’m a Computer Science student at Cal Poly Pomona and a Research Assistant at the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory. 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, Science Olympiad: an autonomous RC car with PID control and CAN bus firmware in C++ on Arduino. That hardware-first instinct shapes everything I build now. It has to work on the device, not just in simulation.
Focus Areas
09 domains
The full stack for an autonomous system, from sensing the world to acting in it.
- 01AutonomyROS 2 · Jetson AGX Orin
- 02PerceptionVLP-16 · ZED X · RealSense D455
- 03SLAMRTAB-Map · LiDAR-ICP · loop closure
- 04LiDAR Processing300k+ pts/sec · Open3D
- 05Sensor FusionLiDAR + cameras + IMU
- 06Path Planningkinodynamic planning · AVL-002
- 07Embedded SystemsArduino · CAN bus · PID firmware
- 08SimulationGazebo · ROS 2 integration
- 09Digital Twins3D Gaussian Splatting · campus-scale
Contact
Let’s build something.
Open to internships, research positions, and full-time roles in robotics and autonomy.
Ryan Simpson
2026 · Robotics Software Engineer