Kai ZHANG

I work on real-time on-road systems for robotics and autonomous systems, in particular, my expertise is in robotics and machine learning. I have a solid mathematical and engineering background:  20 years of hands-on experience in machine learning, localization, prediction, planning, controls and dynamics, and system behavior analysis. I also have experience in computer vision, deep learning-based algorithm design and prototype with automotive use cases, sensor fusion across multiple modalities for perception and localization, radar signal processing and design, open systems architecture, and functional safety.

I have joined L3Harris Technologies as Head of Software Engineering and help to push the state of art of Navigation Solutions with best of best of software engineers, scientists, engineering fellow, and functional leaders. Before L3Harris, I was with Raytheon Technologies as Senior Principal Software Engineer and helped to bring autonomy into space. Previously, I helped Aptiv to bring autonomy for the future as advanced engineering systems manager. Before Aptiv, I was a staff autonomy manager at Argo AI.  I led technical deep dives in architecture of prediction, planning, and control.  I worked with team leads, individual contributors, and other TPMs (Software, TestOps, FleetOps, and Triage) to advance the Argo software products and processes.

Before Argo I was an engineering manager in motion planning and control at American Haval Motor Technology (R&D Centre of Great Wall Motor Company).  As a founding member, I helped to develop the technical roadmap for automated driving system (ADS) and recruited technical members to develop the ADS. I led a team of software engineers on the design, development and validation of new agile and safe planning and control frameworks in complex scenarios.  Before American Haval I led radar firmware team at Delphi for OEMs and in-house ADS.

Before Delphi I worked as engineering lead at Caterpillar, leading the automation layer for autonomous mining trucks. I also possess extensively technical background to collaborate and coordinate with people working on different areas in the company. Before joining Caterpillar, I received my PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Florida State University and my MSc in computer science from Jacob University Bremen and BE degree from Nanjing University of Science and Technology. At those times, I have published papers and patents in perception, localization, mapping, planning, controls, and machine learning.  During my PhD study, I focused on using Swendsen–Wang algorithm and auction theory to derive novel stochastic clustering auction framework to improve the efficiency of solving multiple robot coordination problems.

Previous projects