Work
Twenty-five years of autonomy for vehicles that operate where there are no lane markings — unimproved roads, construction sites, dirt pits, and the terrain between them.
Technical domains
- Off-road autonomy & navigation
- Manned / unmanned teaming
- Mission planning & management
- Bandwidth-constrained teleoperation
- Perception & obstacle detection
Neya Systems
As founder and CEO my job was to grow the company and set technical direction, not to write the code — the work below belongs to a great many talented people. A broader selection lives on the Neya YouTube channel; much of the rest can’t be shown.
Autonomy overview
Wheel-placement planning in heavy clutter, adaptive learning for stereo-generated world models, trail and construction-site navigation, person following, constrained teleoperation, and backing long-combination trailers.
Manned / unmanned teaming
Built with SoarTech: ground vehicles that track and follow individual soldiers, hold a position in formation, and run movement and maneuver tactics — bounding overwatch, taking point, rear guard.
Mission planning & management
Off-line plans authored by experts in a domain-specific planning language, task decomposition to break large tasks into smaller ones, market-based delegation across available robots, and execution monitoring that triggers re-planning when the world disagrees with the plan.
Applied Perception / QinetiQ North America
I arrived as a research engineer and left running projects and operations, including two years at QinetiQ North America after the 2007 acquisition. Lead architect and principal author of the autonomy stack — sensor and platform drivers, perception, path planning — and author of dozens of winning SBIR, BAA, and commercial proposals.
FIRRE — Family of Integrated Rapid Reconnaissance Equipment
An Army Maneuver Support Center program for fixed and mobile rapid-reconnaissance equipment. I developed the autonomy for the large mobile platform.
FIRRE — specifications
- Tracking
- 2–3 cm precision
- Platform
- Hydrostatic skid-steer
- Sensing
- Fused LADAR + RADAR
- Terrain
- Unimproved, difficult
CMU National Robotics Engineering Center
I developed the path tracking and obstacle detection systems for a series of automated golf course fairway mowers — 2–3 cm precision to cut well-defined cross-hatch patterns, plus obstacle detection so the machines never hit anything unexpected on the fairway.