About Me
Information
Hey! I’m Avi — a Computer Engineering Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University and a Drone Researcher at CMU AirLab. My research sits at the intersection of physical AI and autonomous systems: integrating large language models, transformers, and vision systems to build robots that can reason about and act in the real world.
At AirLab I’m enhancing AirStack — an open-source drone simulation platform built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim — and building a drone solution to autonomously monitor excavation progress for Japanese construction firm Shimizu. Before CMU, I founded Codex Laboratories and created SWARM, a cloud-based multi-agent drone simulation platform adopted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and research institutions worldwide.
Over three summers at Saab, I went from building acoustic sensor fusion models and Kafka data pipelines (2023), to designing photo-realistic Unreal Engine environments and computer vision systems for the US Navy’s TSUNOMI project (2024), to training a YOLOv11 object detection model on 10,000 synthetic images at 89% precision and engineering a real-time asynchronous detection pipeline in Unreal Engine with C++ (2025). This summer I’m heading to Aurora Innovation to work on self-driving technology.
One highlight from CMU: as part of the Large Air Vehicle Development Course, our team designed, built, and flew the largest drone ever constructed at Carnegie Mellon — a dodecacopter with a custom carbon fiber airframe weighing ~140 lbs and delivering ~600 lbs of thrust. Seeing it fly after 5–6 hour days in the lab made every late night worth it.
When I’m not in lab or doing homework, you’ll find me on the basketball court.
Education
| Degree | Institution | Years |
|---|---|---|
| M.S. Computer Engineering | Carnegie Mellon University | 2025 – 2026 |
| B.E. Computer Engineering | Purdue University | 2021 – 2025 |
Experience
| Role | Organization | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Drone Researcher | CMU AirLab | Aug 2025 – Present |
| Founding Technical Lead | Codex Laboratories (SWARM) | May 2022 – Present |
| ML Software Engineering Intern | Saab, Inc. | May–Aug 2025 |
| ML Software Intern | Saab | May–Aug 2024 |
| ML Software Engineer Intern | Saab | May–Aug 2023 |
| Drone SWARM Researcher | Purdue University | Aug 2021 – May 2025 |