About Me

I am a Robotics R&D Engineer and Ph.D. Researcher at Embry-Riddle, specializing in Uncertainty Quantification for safety-critical autonomy.

Unlike a traditional academic, I bring 3.5 years of field experience shipping autonomous truck and drone systems at a national research center (TUBITAK), where I led deployments for major industrial partners like Ford OTOSAN.

Top 0.01% National Rank (292 / 2.5 Million)

C++ Production Uncertainty Quantification Sim-to-Real Visual SLAM ROS2 Humble

Experience & Education

Ph.D. Aerospace Engineering

2025–Pres

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, FL, USA

Full tuition waiver. Developing uncertainty-aware deep learning frameworks for robotic perception.

Robotics Engineer (Technical Lead Role)

2021–2024

TUBITAK BILGEM, Turkey

Architected perception stacks for autonomous trucks (Ford OTOSAN partnership). Led technical roadmaps and managed EU-Horizon work packages (~100M€ consortiums).

M.Sc. Computer Engineering

2021–2024

Bogazici University, Turkey

GPA: 4.0/4.0. Thesis on Occlusion-Aware Benchmarking.

B.Sc. Computer Engineering

2016–2021

Bogazici University, Turkey

GPA: 3.21/4.0. Thesis on Adversarial Robustness in Deep Learning.

Selected Publications

2025
Learning Rock Pushability on Rough Planetary Terrain
E. Girgin, T. Girgin, C. Kilic
ICRA Workshop on Field Robotics
2025
EdgeAI Drone for Autonomous Construction Site Demonstrator
E. Girgin, A. T. Candan, C. A. Zaman
ICRA Workshop on Future of Construction
2024
Detection and Quantification of Occlusion for 3D Human Pose
E. Girgin, B. Gokberk, L. Akarun
ICPR Workshop on FBE

Honors & Service

Outstanding Paper Award (3rd Place) IEEE SIU, 2023
Reviewer Elsevier Journal of Digital Signal Processing, 2023
Top 0.15% (Rank 292 / 200k+) National Graduate Exam, 2021
Top 0.01% (Rank 349 / 2.5M+) National Undergraduate Exam, 2016

Projects

Rock Segmentation

Robust Perception for Mars Rovers: ROS2 package to segment rocks and extract surface characteristics.

Vision Robotics
Code

Occlusion Index

Tool for 3D Human Pose and Shape (HPS) occlusion measurement.

Vision
Code

Saliency Attack

Scoring-based black-box adversarial attack using PyTorch.

PyTorch
Code

SMPL Blender

Rendering pipeline for SMPL human models.

Blender Graphics
Code

Tutorials

Blog: Life beyond robotics