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My Robotics and Autonomy Expertise

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While my Ph.D. thesis dealt with lane departure warning systems and self-driving cars, for the last 15 years of my career, I've focused on a broad range of autonomy and planning technologies, with an emphasis on outdoor off-road navigation. While some of the challenges involved in off-road autonomy are similar to on-road autonomy (i.e., driverless cars), there are some substantial differences that I found interesting and worthy of exploration. Specifically:

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  • The terrain is more difficult. We're dealing with unimproved roads, construction sites, dirt pits, etc. 

  • There are a large variety of obstacles and environmental variations.

  • There are fewer "rules of the road" to consider, such as intersections, traffic signs, etc. 

 

In addition to developing core technology related to off-road navigation, I focused on other related capabilities such as mission planning and manned/unmanned teaming. 

Neya Systems

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I was the CEO and Founder of Neya Systems. This means, as we grew, I did very little pure developmental work. Instead, my role was to both grow the company and lead technology development efforts. The work below reflects that, and is the work of many extremely talented individuals. 

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I would encourage you to visit the Neya Systems YouTube Channel, which has a broad range of videos of our past work. While there's a lot that I can't show or talk about, the below is selection of robotics projects and capability videos that are public.  

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Autonomy Overview
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This video shows a broad overview of work that we did at Neya. This includes:

  • An off-road autonomy overview

  • Planning for wheel-placement in heavily cluttered environments

  • Adaptive learning for improving stereo-generated world models

  • Navigating in trails, construction sites, and cluttered environments while following people

  • Teleoperation in bandwidth and latency-constrained environments

  • Backing up long-combination trailers

Manned / Unmanned Teaming
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In conjunction with our partners at SoarTech, We developed a strong base of technology explicitly tailored towards integrating unmanned ground vehicles with squads and dismounted fire teams to provide logistics support. This includes:

  • The ability to track and follow individual soldiers

  • The ability to take the place of a soldier in a formation. 

  • Supporting movement and maneuver tactics such as bounded overwatch, taking point, rear guard, and others

Mission Planning and Managment​​
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We developed a lot of technology related to mission planning, manned-unmanned teaming, and mission management. Our approach includes an off-line planning capability combined with on-line planning and re-planning. Specifically, this means:

  • We use experts to generate an off-line plan using planning tools and a domain specific planning language

  • We include task decomposition algorithms to "break apart" big tasks into smaller ones

  • We use market-based planning approaches to delegate tasks to available robots

  • We monitor plan execution and re-plan when necessary.

Applied Perception

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At API I started as a research engineer and ended up the Director of Projects and Operations. This was a great training ground to become a "triple threat" - this is someone who can be an individual technical contributor, manage technical programs, and write proposals / do business development. 

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Over my 6 years at API (including two at QinetiQ North America after our acquisition in 2007), I developed a full autonomy software stack. This included everything from low level drivers for sensors and platforms, to path planning, and perception systems. I was the lead architect for our autonomy stack, and wrote a majority of the software. In addition to developing a lot of technology, I had the opportunity to learn to write proposals and interact with customers. I wrote dozens of proposals - SBIRs, BAAs, and commercial proposals, and would run the programs I won. 

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My time at API gave me the background, experience, and contacts I needed to start Neya. 

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Family of Integrated Rapid Reconnaissance Equipment
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FIRRE was a program supported by the Army Maneuver Support Center to create set of fixed and mobile equipment for rapid reconnaissance. Our role was adding autonomy to a large mobile platform. I developed this autonomy. This includes:

  • Extremely high accuracy path tracking (2-3 cm precision) of a hydrostatic skid-steer platform

  • Achieving this path tracking accuracy in difficult terrain conditions

  • Fused LADAR and RADAR obstacle detection

CMU National Robotics Engineering Center

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I was a Commercialization Specialist at CMU NREC. In this role, I developed technology and led small teams. 

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Automated Turf Management
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I developed the path tracking and obstacle detection systems for a series of automated golf course fairway mowers. This required:

  • Extremely high accuracy path tracking (2-3 cm precision) in order to mow well defined cross-hatch patterns. 

  • Obstacle detection in order to not hit any unexpected objects on the fairway

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