Connor Hughes

Controls @ Sunday

San Francisco Bay Area

About

Learning from data at massive scale is finally unblocking robotics progress. Robots will soon become ubiquitous. Without knowing exactly what they'll be asked to do, or where they'll be asked to go, we want to be able to trust their actions to be safe, responsive, natural, and expressive. This is the problem I'm working on at Sunday.

Experience

  • Robotics Engineer at Sunday
    Aug 2025 - Present · 1 yr

    building robots to give you back your time

  • Flexiv Robotics ()
    • Senior Robotics Engineer
      Jan 2025 - Aug 2025 · 8 mos

      • improved arm position accuracy 10x, by combining multiple new methods across signal processing, dynamics modeling, trajectory refinement, and kinematic calibration • implemented sensor fusion for a new SOTA method of detecting & localizing multiple body contacts • built new pipeline for programmatic generation & simulation of low-fidelity robot models, to accelerate and scale evaluation of early-stage design concepts • co-designed new virtual dynamics for teleop system with bilateral force feedback, achieving better robustness to singularities and improved stability while retaining haptic transparency • contributed to new actuator designs and sensing architectures for next-gen robot arms • coordinated w/ 20+ colleagues across 4 teams on 2 continents to deploy new calibration methods, QC tests, firmware upgrades, and control SW changes to robots in mass production

    • Robotics Engineer
      Jul 2022 - Jan 2025 · 2 yrs 7 mos

  • Mechatronics Engineer Intern at Flexiv Robotics
    Jun 2021 - Sep 2021 · 4 mos

    • evaluated performance of 6-DOF F/T sensors through both experiments and sim • integrated external sensors w/ arm, tested inertial parameter estimation methods

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant at UC Santa Barbara
    Jan 2021 - Jun 2021 · 6 mos

    • TA for ME 104- Mechatronics: ran lab sessions for juniors/seniors covering the use of microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators in multiple robotics projects • TA for ME 127- Intro to Mechanisms: provided students with support for circuit design and Arduino programming during a quarter-long electromechanical design project

  • Marine Electrical Engineer at Glosten
    Oct 2019 - Sep 2020 · 1 yr

    • Integrated power distribution and control systems for a rocket landing platform vessel for a private space technology company • Designed & ran 6-month project to lay groundwork for a new companywide data strategy, wrote 50 pg report, shared findings w/ leadership and at all-hands mtg, inspired follow-on investment • Developed new workflows using EPLAN to efficiently manage large-scale cable block diagrams • Automated data processing tasks w/ VBA and AutoLISP for 3 projects, saving hundreds of hours