I’m the Director of Robotics at Southwest Research Institute. My team builds connected and automated vehicles, advanced manufacturing robots, and space robots.
I write about the Bible at VerseNotes, about my adventures at Savvy Hedgehog, and about everything else right here on my blog.
The Long Version
I’ve spent my career looking for longer levers with which to make the world a better place, but I didn’t always think that way. When I started college at Virginia Tech in 2004, my primary thoughts were, “Robots are cool; Blacksburg is beautiful.” I spent the next seven years working toward a degree that would let me play with robots forever and spending as much time as possible outside in Blacksburg—whether in town, in the mountains, or at football games.
When I graduated in 2011 with my M.S. in Electrical Engineering, I cast about for robotics jobs and found Southwest Research Institute, a weird non-profit in Texas with a mission to do cool research that makes the world a better place1. They had just wrapped up a massive internal research program to develop an on-road automated vehicle à la the DARPA Urban Challenge, and I wanted in.
My notes from the time show that it took me a few years to figure out that I wanted in not only on the technology but also the mission. Robots are cool, sure, but research without results is just a really expensive hobby. I wanted to get these robots out into the world to do things! Of course, my new colleagues agreed, and as a result, we slowly changed our pitch: we weren’t competing with Google X/Waymo/Argo/Tesla/Uber, we were competing with the status quo. So we worked on a lot of less-than-autonomous vehicles, and we helped car companies research, develop, and adopt ADAS2, and we bridged our work to traditional traffic management systems through connected vehicle technology. Anything that would help our clients make their world better, and soon. And we kept working on full-bore go-anywhere no-humans-needed autonomous mobility.
Over the next seven years, I touched a lot of projects, and not all of them looked like self-driving cars. I started sharing my work with the world, and then I started shaping the world with my work. As our little ad hoc AV research group grew into a proper organization, I kept leveling up my opportunity to shape our future: first as an engineer focused on technology, then as a program manager focused on ecosystems, and finally as an engineering manager focused on teams of people building ecosystems of technology.
In 2022, as part of a divisional reorganization, we collected all of our robotics work into one entity, placing the robots that look like cars alongside the robots that look like arms and scooping up our nascent space robotics group along the way. I was asked to lead the newly formed Robotics Department, where we have set ourselves the vision of becoming the world’s most comprehensive robotics research organization.
Longer levers.
