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Hi, I'm Amber! I'm pursuing my Master's in Robotics at Northwestern University. I have 3 years of backend engineering experience, and my interests are in embedded software engineering and computer vision.

My projects

Autonomous Building Inspection with Unitree Go2

A quadruped robot that autonomously maps buildings, detects safety equipment, and tracks changes between inspection runs using 3D SLAM, frontier exploration, and vision-language segmentation.

GitHub

ROS 2
SLAM
Nav2
RTAB-Map
Computer Vision
SAM 3
C++
Python
RealSense

PenPal

A vision-guided ROS 2 system that reads a real whiteboard and writes short responses back with a 7-DoF Franka arm.

GitHub

ROS 2
Robotic Manipulation
Computer Vision
AprilTags
RealSense
MoveIt
OpenCV

Aggrobots

Swarm robot game with distributed embedded behaviors, ToF sensing, wireless sync, and AprilTag localization.

GitHub

C
Embedded Systems
Microcontrollers
AprilTags
RealSense

SMMARTS Programming Volunteering

Program to quantify arterial perforation accuracy in ultrasound-guided simulations.

C#
Unity

Sollum

A 2.5D Lovecraftian climate-themed game with dialogue and combat systems implemented.

GitHub

C#
Unity

Critter Collector

A educational Pokémon Go-style mobile game for learning about local fauna.

GitHub

Node.js
MongoDB
REST APIs
Unreal Engine 5

My skills

ROS/ROS 2
Python
C
C++
OpenCV
RealSense
Linux
Docker
Git
AWS
Motion Planning
Computer Vision
Embedded Systems
Kinematics
PCB Design
Reinforcement Learning
PPO
Sim-to-Real Transfer
Domain Randomization
Isaac Lab
MuJoCo
PyTorch
Control
State Estimation
SLAM
Legged Locomotion
LiDAR
Sensor Calibration
TypeScript
CI/CD

My experience

Started my education at University of Florida

Gainesville, FL

Began in Biology, then pivoted to Computer & Information Science & Engineering after leading in GatorTech. Built a strong CS foundation while exploring robotics and systems.

May 2019 - May 2024

CodePath iOS Tech Fellow

Gainesville, FL

Co-led a 14-week course for 25+ students with two fellows. Taught Swift app dev, ran code reviews, and mentored students.

August 2021 - December 2021

Software Engineer

Infotech | Gainesville, FL

Architected an AWS/Python PDF pipeline for DOT plan documents; led a 3-engineer team to customize deployments per DOT.

September 2022 - August 2025

Master's of Robotics at Northwestern University

Evanston, IL

Enrolled in Northwestern’s M.S. in Robotics to deepen my understanding of perception, motion, and control, and to transition from purely digital systems to building robots that interact directly with the real world.

Sep 2025 - Present

Reinforcement Learning Engineer | Perceptive Locomotion

Persona AI | Pensacola, FL

Building the company's first perceptive locomotion capability: vision-conditioned RL policies (PPO, Isaac Lab) trained against customer site requirements, validated sim-to-sim in MuJoCo, and deployed on hardware with RealSense and LiDAR perception in ROS 2.

June 2026 - Present

Contact me

Please contact me directly at amberhandal.dev@gmail.com or through this form.