Robotics Software Engineer

Irfan Ali

I like to build robots.

At Berkshire Grey, working on robotic warehouse automation. Before that, an MS in Robotics at Northeastern and perception research at the Silicon Synapse Lab, on robots that slither, tumble and fly.

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Portrait of Irfan Ali
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  • Python
  • C/C++
  • CUDA
  • ROS
  • PyTorch
  • ORB-SLAM 3
  • RTAB-Map
  • YOLO v8
  • Point Cloud Library
  • Jetson Orin NX
  • Eigen
  • Gazebo
  • TensorFlow
  • Docker
  • MATLAB
  • Mask2Former

01 About

I am a Software Engineer interested in the intersection of Robotics and Computer Vision, with a passion for building products that benefit humanity.

Languages

  • Python
  • C/C++
  • CUDA
  • MATLAB

Tools & frameworks

  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • ROS
  • Gazebo
  • Eigen
  • Point Cloud Library (PCL)
Irfan explaining a robot arm he built
Irfan giving a talk about drones

02 Experience

Robotics Software Engineer

Berkshire Grey

Jan 2026 — Present

A Berkshire Grey shuttle placing an item into a tote
Berkshire Grey robotic pick cell placing items into totes

Images © Berkshire Grey

Stride™ Shuttle Sorter

Autonomous shuttles and intelligent routing that sort a wide range of items straight into store-bound containers.

See Stride™ at berkshiregrey.com

Research Assistant

Perception and Sensor Integration · Silicon Synapse Lab, Northeastern University

Nov 2023 — Dec 2025

COBRA snake robot rolling and moving in the lab A · COBRA

Cobra

A tumbling modular snake-inspired robot

★NASA Big Idea Challenge winning project
  • Engineered real-time object detection and 3D pose estimation pipeline using YOLO v8 and RealSense cameras; containerized with Docker for deployment on Nvidia Jetson Orin NX.
  • Implemented semantic segmentation (MIT-SemSeg, Mask2Former) for multi-class scene understanding in autonomous systems.
  • Developed SIFT-based object detector for real-time applications, addressing scalability issues with increasing reference images.
  • YOLO v8
  • RealSense
  • Docker
  • Jetson Orin NX
  • Mask2Former
  • SIFT
Aerobat flapping-wing robot in flight, slowed down 20 times B · AEROBAT

Aerobat

A flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle

Watch it fly
  • Implemented Visual-Inertial Odometry system on a flapping-wing aerial robot, providing pose estimation feedback to the PID flight controller.
  • Compared the odometry from ORB-SLAM 3 and RTAB-Map, and robustness to rapid motion characteristics of flapping-wing flight.
  • Conducted calibration of the Arducam global shutter camera and Adafruit 9-DoF IMU, while benchmarking the SLAM results with Mocap (OptiTrack Motion Capture) system using the Evo evaluation package.
  • VIO
  • ORB-SLAM 3
  • RTAB-Map
  • IMU calibration
  • OptiTrack
  • Evo

03 Projects

Selected work

COBRA modular snake robot

P/01Research project

COBRA: Snake Robot

A tumbling modular snake-inspired robot. NASA Big Idea Challenge winner.

  • Computer Vision
  • Sensor Integration
Aerobat flapping-wing aerial robot

P/02Research project

Aerobat: Flapping-wing Aerial Robot

A flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle.

  • SLAM
  • Sensor Integration

↳ Roles

Roles I’m interested in

Robotics Engineer

  1. Robot Perception Engineering
  2. SLAM Development and Optimization
  3. Sensor Fusion and Calibration
  4. Autonomous Navigation and Path Planning
  5. Embedded System Programming
  6. Robotic System Troubleshooting

Computer Vision Engineer

  1. 3D Perception and Depth Estimation
  2. Deep Learning for Vision Tasks
  3. GPU-Accelerated Computing for Vision
  4. Large-Scale Data Annotation and Augmentation

04 Writing

Notes, explainers and a weekly today I learned log, published at sites.irfanali.me.

05 Contact

Let’s build something
that moves.

Always up for a conversation about robots, perception and SLAM. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

writetoirfanali@gmail.com
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