About

Karan Chawla is an experienced autonomy software engineer with a passion for solving complex technological problems at the intersection of people and software. Currently working as a Robotics Software Engineer at Elroy Air, Karan has developed motion planning and computer vision software for autonomous helicopters, drones, and ag-robots in the past. Before joining Elroy Air, Karan co-founded Resolute Labs, where he developed a cloud-native platform for energy infrastructure inspection and predictive maintenance. He also interfaced visual and IR cameras with IMU to transform traditional aircraft inspections into digital patrols and deployed serverless deep learning models for object detection and classification of incident types. Karan has also worked as an Autonomy Engineer at Skyryse, where he developed a Hardware-In-The-Loop simulation for the company's R-44 General Aviation Helicopter platform by interfacing the aircraft sensors with X-Plane and Matlab. He also designed the guidance logic for autonomous take-off, landing, and Mission Task Elements while supporting flight tests from the co-pilot seat as a Flight Test Engineer. Additionally, he developed, trained, and tested edge-AI visual perception systems using an RGB camera for landing site obstacle detection. Karan holds a Master of Science degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering (Intelligent Systems) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani. With over 5 years of relevant experience, Karan is skilled in software engineering, computer vision, object detection, deep learning, and AI. He is a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in infra, SDET, test, and integration.