Ashok Elluswamy

VP - Autopilot / AI Software at Tesla

San Francisco Bay Area

About

Robotics engineer with broad experience from computer vision and perception through planning and control. Inspired to solve meaningful and challenging real-world problems using state-of-the-art technology! Eager to work hard and learn continuously.

Experience

  • Tesla (12 yrs 7 mos)
    • Vice President - AI Software
      Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 10 mos

      Anything and everything required to get self-driving 4-wheeled robots widely.

    • Director - Autopilot Software
      May 2019 - Oct 2024 · 5 yrs 6 mos

      Leading the autonomy software team for the Tesla Autopilot. My team's main focus areas are: - Creation of large scale automatic ground truth pipelines to train neural networks with massive amounts of diverse, high-quality data. Use this fleet-learning approach to replace potentially brittle run-time algorithms with robust learned models. - Developing an accurate and detailed geometric and semantic understanding of the world using the best of both machine-learned and engineered models. - Building robust, causal, predictive models for other agents in both geometry and semantic state spaces. - Decision making, motion planning, and control modules using state-of-the-art AI techniques including methods for high-dimensional search, trajectory optimization, reinforcement learning, model-predictive control, etc.

    • Senior Staff Software Engineer - Autopilot
      Sep 2017 - Apr 2019 · 1 yr 8 mos

      Worked on geometric scene understanding to significantly improve the performance of Autopilot using fleet learning techniques.

  • Research Intern at Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab
    May 2013 - Dec 2013 · 8 mos

    Research and development of a robust, camera-based, perception system to recognize and register various road-marks on the vehicle's drivable road surface in-order to precisely localize the car. This project was part of the autonomous driving team of Volkswagen.

  • Software Engineer at WABCO Vehicle Control Systems
    Apr 2010 - Jul 2012 · 2 yrs 4 mos

    Vehicle Dynamics and Control * Worked on brake actuation modules to establish real-time performance guarantees of actuators * Development and validation of onboard and offboard diagnostics software for vehicle's Electronic Control Unit * Development and testing of embedded software for interfacing and controlling actuation devices