Work Experience

Skydio
Skydio
Control of fully autonomous flying robots
Head of Vehicle Planning and Controls (Senior Autonomy Engineering Manager)
05/2023 - present
Senior Autonomy Engineer
05/2021 - 04/2023
Software Engineer - Motion Planning / Dynamics and Control
03/2017 - 04/2021, 50% since 10/2018, 75% from 10/2019 to 05/2020
San Mateo, CA, USA; Redwood City, CA, USA
Fully autonomous drones. See Technology and some independent in-depth reviews.

TUM
Technical University Munich (TUM) / Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM)
Flying robot swarms
Postdoc at TUM Chair for Robotics and Systems Intelligence
10/2018 - 05/2020 (50% from 10/2018 to 09/2019, 25% from 10/2019 to 05/2020)
Munich, Germany

German Aerospace Center
German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics
Adaptive Control for autonomous MAVs in unstructured GPS-denied environments
Researcher
03/2011 - 03/2017
Munich, Germany
See Publications.

Hipersfera
Hipersfera
Modeling, simulation, guidance and control for an autonomous unmanned omnidirectional airship
Systems Engineer - Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC)
10/2008 - 06/2010
Zagreb, Croatia
See Master's Thesis in Publications.

Awards, Talks, and Editorial Work

Awards
Georges Giralt PhD award for best robotics dissertation in Europe
IROS Conference Best Paper Award Winner, Robust Visual-Inertial State Estimation with Multiple Odometries and Efficient Mapping on an MAV with Ultra-Wide FOV Stereo Vision
IROS RoboCup Best Paper Award Winner, Stereo vision based indoor/outdoor navigation for flying robots

Talks
RSS 2020 Workshop on Perception and Control for Fast and Agile Super-Vehicles [video], virtual
Universitz of Zurich RPG Lab | ETH Zurich RSL | Learning to fly meetup: Fully Autonomous Vision Based Flight in the Wild: Progress and Challenges, Zurich, Switzerland
RSS 2019 Aerial Interaction and Manipulation: Unsolved Challenges and Perspectives: Towards Learning Manipulation Skills Under Wind Influence, Freiburg, Germany
RSS 2019 Workshop on Safe Autonomy, Freiburg, Germany
IEEE CDC 2018 special session, Miami Beach, FL, USA
Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS), Berkeley, CA, USA
RSS Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction for Small and Personal Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
RSS Workshop on Resource-efficient Integration of Planning and Perception for True Autonomous Operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), Berkeley, CA, USA

Editorial Work
Associate Editor (AE) for IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
European Control Conference (ECC)
American Control Conference (ACC)
IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM)
Journal of Aerospace Engineering (JAERO)

Education

Leibniz University Hanover
Leibniz University Hanover (LUH) Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)
Dr.-Ing. in Robotics
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sami Haddadin
Georges Giralt PhD Award 2019 for best European doctoral thesis in robotics
04/2014 - 10/2018
Hanover, Germany
Model-Based Control of Flying Robots for Robust Interaction under Wind Influence [ pdf ]. Control methods to make autonomous MAVs flying in unknown and uncertain environments robust to environmental forces. Covers interaction control; collision detection, identification, isolation and reflexes; tactile mapping; aerodynamics modeling; wind speed estimation and compensation. See Publications.

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FAMENA)
Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering; Mechatronics and Robotics
Graduated with Honors (top 5% in class)
04/2008 - 02/2010
Zagreb, Croatia
Robust control of rigid body motion [ PDF ] First-order sliding mode control with boundary layer and PD sliding surface combined with distubance observer control applied to the model of an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) under strong wave disturbances. Developed an iterative control allocation algorithm for vectored propulsion with saturation. Dynamics of UUV derived using tensor representation. Feedback control using Euler-Rodriguez (dual quaternion) representation of body configuration. Developed while working on the Hipersfera airship.

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FAMENA)
Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering; Mechatronics and Robotics
09/2004 - 04/2008
Zagreb, Croatia