Aaron Qin

Aaron Qin (秦佑铭) is the co-founder and CEO of Manifold Tech (留形科技), a startup building spatial perception and memory systems for embodied AI and mobile robots . He earned his undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech, where in 2017 he led a team to the RoboMaster finals—one of only two North American teams to advance that far . He then pursued a PhD at the University of Hong Kong under advisor Fu Zhang, co-establishing the MaRS Lab, HKU's first drone laboratory, in what was originally a basement boiler room . The lab's FAST-LIO open-source project for 3D mapping became widely influential, reaching 2.4k GitHub stars . In 2022, Qin and FAST-LIO first author Xu Wei founded Manifold Tech; the company's product achieved profitability within three months of launch . The startup has since evolved toward what the team calls a "hippocampus" module—an NPU-powered unit that handles image semantics, object recognition, spatial mapping, and shared real-time memory for robots .