Helen Oleynikova!

ETH Zürich — Zürich, Switzerland

PhD in Mechanical Engineering (October 2015 – February 2019)

Supervised by Prof. Roland Siegwart
Thesis: Mapping and Planning for Safe Collision Avoidance On-board Micro-Aerial Vehicles

ETH Zürich — Zürich, Switzerland

M.S. in Robotics, Systems, and Control (September 2013 – May 2015)

Recipient of the ESOP scholarship (full funding for duration of the Master’s)
GPA: 5.43 / 6.00

Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — Needham, MA, USA

B.S. in Engineering, Concentration in Robotics (September 2007 – May 2011)

Recipient of the Olin Scholarship (full tuition for four years)
GPA: 3.55 / 4.00

ETH Zürich, Mobile Robotics Lab — Zürich, Switzerland

Senior Researcher (August 2025 – Present)

• Assisting Prof. Stefan Leutenegger in bringing up a new research group.
• Supervising humanoid robotics efforts from the start: helping students set up hardware and software infrastructure, deciding standards, and helping design overall architecture and research direction.
• Co-supervising 7 PhD students, helping shape research direction and overall vision of the lab.

ETH Zürich, Autonomous Systems Lab — Zürich, Switzerland

Senior Researcher (May 2023 – Present)

• Supervising 6 PhD students through their doctoral studies, in research, project work, and career and personal development.
• Led the ETH part of Horizon 2020 EU Project HERON, focusing on autonomous road infrastructure repair and maintenance using robotic mobile manipulators.
• Led the ETH part of Marie Curie Program EU Project AERO-TRAIN to educate the next generation of aerial manipulation researchers.
• Teaching lectures and designing assessments for the Autonomous Mobile Robots course (300+ enrolled students) and the ETH Robotics Summer School.

NVIDIA — Zürich, Switzerland

Senior Software Engineer, 3D Robotic Perception (March 2021 – January 2023)

• Created nvblox, a GPU-accelerated 3D volumetric mapping library for the Nvidia Jetson, enabling robots to perceive obstacles and plan around them in real time on computationally constrained platforms.
• Integrated nvblox into ROS2, released the work as permissively licensed open source, and tested extensively on 2D robots for warehouse applications.
• Collaborated with research teams towards manipulation applications of the work.
• Performed over 40 interviews for junior and senior positions across various teams.
• Reviewed for Nvidia Academic Fellowship, Academic Hardware Grants, and internal conferences.

Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab — Zürich, Switzerland

Senior Scientist, Mixed Reality Robotics (September 2019 – January 2021)

• Worked on a two-person Mixed Reality Robotics team to set overall goals with future customer needs in mind, design and architect services, and implement prototypes.
• Architected and implemented core functionality for a distributed cloud-based service for spatial data management for Mixed Reality and robotics applications.
• Investigated, prototyped, and demonstrated applications for how Mixed Reality can be used to interact with and control robots.
• Set up a workshop and development space for robotics, coordinating purchase of equipment, robots, computing infrastructure, and safety equipment.

ETH Zürich, Autonomous Systems Lab — Zürich, Switzerland

Post-Doctoral Researcher (February 2019 – May 2019)

• Led part of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge team to research solutions for autonomous mapping with UAVs and ground vehicles of tunnels and mines, working within a consortium of five international partners.
• Focused on state estimation and 3D reconstruction in low-light conditions using a combination of cameras and 3D lidar on computationally constrained platforms.
• Coordinated efforts across master’s students and various teams within the lab to fulfil project objectives for both DARPA Sub-T and the Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge 2020.

Google, Street View — Mountain View, CA, USA

Software Engineer II (November 2011 – April 2013)

• Owned the data mining pipeline for extracting street numbers from Street View imagery to improve maps data: gathered ground truth, designed and ran evaluations, and used vision-based feature extraction, machine learning, and OCR to improve the pipeline.
• Worked on a small team to create and launch a production service allowing users to share their own panoramas to Street View.
• Created automatic image enhancement methods and performed large-scale evaluations of image quality and user preferences using machine learning techniques.
• Designed and tested features for automatic landmark detection from imagery.

Willow Garage — Menlo Park, CA, USA

Robotics Intern (Summer 2011)

• Worked on a low-cost robot arm for hobbyist robotics in ROS: built a system for robust camera-to-arm calibration, created documentation and assembly instructions for hobbyists, and created tools and demos.
• Developed a demo where the robot automatically detected wooden blocks on a surface and used the arm to pick them up and move them as requested by the user.

• AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar — Honorable Mention in Robotics in 2022, 2023, and 2025.
• Part of the winning team CERBERUS for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (2018–2021).
• Received the 2020 ICRA CEB Award for Outstanding Reviewer.
• Awarded the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Program (ESOP) from ETH Zürich for the duration of Master’s studies.

• 28.11.2025 — Schülerinnentag 2025 , ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
• 02.11.2025 — Huawei Research Summit, Zürich, Switzerland
• 12.03.2025 — Women in Robotics Meetup, Zürich, Switzerland: A Very Non-Linear Robotics Career
• 23.01.2025 — INRIA Rennes, France
• 09.10.2024 — Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL), KTH, Stockholm, Sweden
• 18.07.2024 — Zürich CV/ML Meetup, ABB, Zürich, Switzerland: Volumetric Mapping for Robot Path Planning
• 23.10.2022 — Horizons of Extended Robotics Reality Workshop, IROS 2022, Kyoto, Japan: 3D Robotic Perception and Mixed and Virtual Reality
• 12.11.2020 — The University of Sydney (ACFR), Sydney, Australia: Mixed Reality, Volumetric Mapping, and Robotics: Sharing Spaces with Robots
• 29.05.2018 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, USA: Vision-Based Mapping and Planning for Micro-Aerial Vehicle Search and Rescue
• 24.03.2017 — University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney, Australia: Safe Operation using Vision-Based Sensing for Micro-Aerial Vehicles
• 16.11.2016 — International Technical Symposium on Navigation and Timing (ITSNT), Toulouse, France: When GPS Fails: Navigation, Planning, and Safety in GPS-denied Environments using Vision-based Sensing on MAVs

Reviewer & Editorial Work

• Reviewer for 66+ conference papers (ICRA, IROS) and 55+ journal articles (IEEE T-RO, RA-L, JFR, IJARS).
• Area Chair, RSS 2025.
• Associate Editor, ICRA 2024.
• Reviewer for Nvidia Academic Fellowship and Nvidia Academic Hardware Grants.
• Co-author of the SLAM Handbook, dense mapping chapter (2025).

Professional Contributions

• Co-inventor on 3 patent applications (2 granted).
• Co-organizer of IROS 2024 workshop on “Long-Term Perception for Autonomy in Dynamic Human-shared Environments: What Do Robots Need?”.
• Co-organizer of IROS 2022 workshop on XR and Robotics, “Horizons of an Extended Robotics Reality”.
• Co-organizer of IROS 2020 tutorial on Mixed Reality and Robotics.
• Volunteer at CORL 2018, FSR 2017, ECCV 2014.

Doctoral & Graduate Mentorship

• Doctoral committee member for:
  • Jose Manuel Gaspar Sanchez (KTH, 2025)
  • Ludvig Ericson (KTH, 2025)
  • Thibault Noel (INRIA Rennes, 2025)
• Co-supervisor of Xuning Yang’s PhD, CMU Robotics Institute (2022).
• Supervised 30+ Master’s projects during PhD and postdoctoral work.