Shawn Yao

Shawn Yao has extensive experience in robotics and control systems engineering. In 2017, they were the Captain/Control Engineer for the HKU RoboMaster Team, where they lead the operations and mechatronic integration of a camera-equipped remote-controlled robot tank, delivered within 6 months. Shawn adopted FreeRTOS and OOP paradigm for C development on ARM Cortex-M and built object detection with OpenCV and hue-based filtering techniques with CUDA acceleration to automate and accelerate enemy targeting. This earned the team a Second Prize in the 2018 International Regional Match and a Third Prize in the 2019 International Regional Match. In 2019, they were the System Integration Advisor for the Vayu Robotic Fish Project, where they refactored the embedded system code and remote control protocol and implemented the CRC8 algorithm to prevent data corruption. This project earned a Guinness World Record for The Fastest 50m Swim by a Robotic Fish. In 2020, they were the Embedded Software Engineer for WiFigarden Inc., where they improved the “Smart Connect” feature, a scalable Wi-Fi setup automation process for IoT devices based on SSDP protocol, by restructuring the code, adding unit tests, reducing the memory footprint, and accelerating connection speed. Shawn also collaborated with fall detection radar imaging & home appliance companies, and integrated their products with Wi-Fi and IoT technologies. In 2021, they were the Associate Software Engineer for ADLINK Technology, where they migrated the AGV software stack from ROS1 to ROS2. In 2022, they are currently the Robotics and Control Systems Analyst for Cornerstone Robotics Limited.

Shawn Yao attended The University of Hong Kong from 2016 to 2022, where they obtained a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science.