Arturo Saucedo
Research Robotics Engineer @ CERL
B.S. Aerospace Engineering, Minor in GGIS
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Check out our most recent work, paper coming soon! intelligent earthmoving

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Future funding for my current lab is up in the air, so I'm looking for another job.

I'm a robotics engineer, currently working with a small team on applied research with autonomous heavy equipment.

I currently work at the Construction Engineering Research Lab, on the Robotics for Engineer Operations program, as part of the Heavy Equipment Autonomy team. We're now focused on adapting and training various SOTA robotic policies (mostly VLAs) to enable greater levels of autonomy on our robotic construction platforms.

On our compact track loader, I significantly contributed to the robotic retrofit, leading the initial reverse engineering and integration work. This work eliminated key vendor locks and helped define a common system architecture for general use across Army Robotics in unknown, contested environments, enabling greater standoff distances and force multiplication for engineer operations.

I currently lead hardware and software integration on the platform, and contribute to development of simulation, data collection, and training software. Listing it all out, some of my responsibilities include:

• Developing low-fidelity sim for RL policy training.
• Architecting and maintaining our docker-based dev env.
• Architecting the robot's ros2 software stack.
• Setting up and managing onsite ML training servers.
• Writing ros2 drivers for COTS automotive & industrial grade sensors.
• Integrating perception sensors (lidar, stereo, PoE cams).
• Writing ros2_controls software for the robot (from the URDF to system and sensor interfaces).
• Integrating in-house autonomous blade controllers.
• Reverse engineering CAN-based vehicle communications.
• Making tons of electrical harnesses.
• Demoing capabilities on the field.
• And of course, maintaining everything.

Previously, I've worked on localization and computer vision for the same team (mostly on a different platform) including:

• Estimating bulldozer blade pose from an egocentric stereo camera.
• Improving GNSS-Denied UGV localization subsystem, fixing error estimation and incorporating a particle filter.
• Creating a GIS pipeline to standardize data inputs and georeference data outputs.
• Demoing capabilities on the field.
• Supporting demos remotely and asynchronously.

Before that, I worked on a historical preservation project recording the architectural, historical, and political significance of cold war era launch sites in Vandenberg Space Force Base. (This included site visits! I got to touch a Firefly Alpha!)

And before that, I conducted some exploratory urban geography research, looking into the interplay between urban highway bridge infrastructure and the surrounding urban population (urban morphology stuff). I'm a little bit of a geographer!

Anyway, I'm primarily motivated by the goal of establishing a permanent human presence in outer space, particularly on the Moon and Mars. These environments require systems with a high degree of autonomy, as human operation is limited and teleoperation from Earth is difficult. This applies to everything, from survey rovers, to earthmoving robots, to autonomous factories using in-situ resources. {Astro, Cosmo, Taiko, Vyoma}nauts have better things to do than sit in a Martian dump truck.

Unfortunately, Earth also suffers from similar problems. So I want to work on interesting solutions towards the same overarching goal of increased autonomy in boring or dangerous work.

Humans have better things to do than sit in a dump truck.

Last Edited 06/16/26