Richard Mason [Team Leader / Ladar Perception / Tracking / Global Path Planning]
Dr. Richard Mason started the Golem Group in 2003 with $50,000 that he won on the game show Jeopardy. He has led the Golem Group to the finals in both previous DARPA Challenge events and will again serve as our Team Leader for the Urban Grand Challenge. Richard received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2003, where he held a National Science Foundation Fellowship and was a research assistant in the Robotics Laboratory. His Ph.D. thesis was on trajectory planning for mobile robots by building a long path out of a series of smaller discrete maneuvers. As an example of a mobile system, he built a robot fish which would swim around in a tank. He currently holds the position of Engineer at the RAND Corporation, a think tank, where he works on projects serving the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force. Two of his past RAND projects with tangential relevance to DARPA Grand Challenge problems involved the simulation of unmanned ground vehicles crossing fractally-generated terrain, and the detection and tracking of moving air targets.
Jim Radford [Team Leader / Chief Architect / System Integration]
Dr. Jim Radford was the chief architect and lead programmer for the Golem Group's successful entries in the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge events. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2003 where he studied locomotion, motion planning and control of non-holonomic mechanical systems. In his thesis, Jim studied deformable bodies in fluids. In particular he described their group structure and a novel geometric series expansion for their motions due to cyclic body shape changes. His research led to computationally tractable models for simulation, planning and control of swimming robots. In addition to and in parallel with his academic career, he has worked for over 12 years as a consultant software engineer designing and creating real-time embedded kernels, feedback control systems and hardware drivers.
Josh Arensberg [Quality Assurance and Safety / Information Technology]
Josh Arensberg brings to the group a system integration and field troubleshooting background, along with knowledge of uncompressed video, digital imaging, and RF systems. Josh currently works as Global CIO for SDI Media Group, a rich media language and dubbing company located in Los Angeles. Josh also operates as the Golem Group's Safety Officer. In previous efforts he has contributed to the Golem Group in the areas of mechanical and electrical design, support of geo-positioning systems, and testing and reliability.
Mike Beebe [Systems Integration and testing]
Mike Beebe is a Research Engineer with SRI International. His professional interests are remote sensing, modeling, and simulation. Recently he has focused on the creation of highly accurate micro-geo-specific terrain models for DoD training. His background in remote sensing, GPS, surveying, and systems integration have allowed him to contribute to Golem's INS tuning, map creation, systems testing, and simulation efforts.
Bill Caldwell [Project Management / Vehicle Automation]
Bill Caldwell has previously served as the Vice President of Engineering at Emulex, Q-Logic, and Indigita corporations. As a teen he won a California state competition by building a complete television station including the camera, transmitter, and receiver for the amateur radio band. He hand built his first computers in the 1970s and 1980s including a DEC PDP-8e, PDP-11-34, LSI 11, and Apple II. He has designed countless electronic systems, both hardware and software, over the past 35 years and worked extensively on the hardware systems of our last robot, Golem 2. Based on his previous managerial experience, Bill will oversee project management for The Golem Group LLC during the Urban Challenge. He will additionally have primary design responsibility for the vehicle's reverse engineering, custom electronics, sensors, and actuation and oversee the mechanical conversion of Golem 3 to autonomous operation.
David Caldwell [Simulation Software / Visualization Tools / Embedded Systems]
David Caldwell worked extensively on the the simulation and visualization environment developed by The Golem Group during the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge events. He also designed and wrote code for our embedded subsystems for the 2005 Grand Challenge. Since building an Apple II at home when he was in 2nd grade, David has made programming both his hobby and his career. He has worked on a wide variety of projects, from ancient arcade game systems to large open source collaborations. Most recently, David worked at Indigita Corporation where he was a principal software architect. His projects there included control software for the mechanism of a custom built tape drive and a complete custom kernel and real time operating system for an embedded chip design, including the filesystem and networking subsystem. David has since left Indigita to consult independently. His most recent project involved control software for an endoscope incorporating feedback from accelerometers, gyros, and magnetometers.
Brian Fulkerson [Vision Systems / Simulation Software / Embedded Systems]
Brian Fulkerson is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Vision at UCLA. He received his B.S. in computer engineering from UCSD in 2004.
Ken Kappler [Mechanical Design]
Ken Kappler has always been mechanically oriented and started taking things apart and learning how stuff works from an early age. Totally self taught over the past several decades, Ken has amassed a workshop of considerable capacity, with nearly three dozen floor standing machines. His knowledge of tool and machine applications is extensive and he has developed considerable skills in working with a variety of materials including metals, woods, plastics, fabrics, rubber and fibers. He prefers to be called a skilled craftsman.
His contribution the Golem 3 was the design and fabrication of its brake system.
Dmitriy Kogan [Path Planning / Embedded Systems]
Dmitriy Kogan was a primary developer for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge entry of Team Caltech, writing the software framework and designing and developing the planning and navigation system for the vehicle "Alice". This work formed part of his M.S. in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. Dmitriy has been working and playing with computers all his life. He has written code ranging from an assembly language chess engine to a computer virus vaccine to a large-scale FFT running on dedicated hardware. He has made hardware to color-sort M&Ms and has designed and built a pneumatic robotic "ball" that rolls by pushing out pistons.
Deepak Kumar [State Estimation]
Deepak Kumar is a 4th-year Ph.D. student at Caltech working on plasma physics instrumentation in the Applied Physics department. He holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Among his honors are the "Most Innovative Project" award from IIT Bombay for his "Prosthetic Hand Control Using Audio Cues" and a gold medal for one of the top 25 performances on India's National Standard Examination in Physics. In our 2005 Grand Challenge effort, Deepak was primarily responsible for the vehicle's state estimation software subsystem.
Michael Linderman [Planning]
Michael Linderman is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on programming models for heterogeneous multi-core computers and multi-core architectures for demanding information processing applications in the biological sciences.
Roy Pollock [Simulation and Troubleshooting]
Roy Pollock is a senior software developer and engineering manager with Green Hills Software, Inc RTOS division. He is working on extending the simulation capabilities for Golem 3 and field troubleshooting.
Robb Walters [Vehicle Testing / Local Path Planning / Control Tuning]
Robb Walters is an experimental scientist from Caltech with a knack for troubleshooting and an enthusiasm for working on difficult problems. He is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis in the Applied Physics department, describing a new class of quantum dot light emitting devices as a possible enabling technology for silicon photonics. During the first Grand Challenge, Robb worked on the hardware side of the Golem Group vehicle. He transitioned to software development for the 2005 Grand Challenge in order to develop our planning system. Robb brings breadth to the team through his understanding of physical systems and experimental design. In addition to working on extending the planning code, he will be in charge of tuning the vehicle in the field and testing our autonomous driving system to ensure reliability and safety.
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Kerry Connor Jerry Fuller Eagle Jones Jason Meltzer Brent Morgan |
Jeff Elings Izaak Giberson Maribeth Mason Jim Swenson |
Kerry Connor is currently pursuing her M.S. in Computer Science: Intelligent Robotics at USC. She received her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA in 2003. She then worked at the Vision Lab at UCLA.
Jeff Elings is a former off-road racer. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of California at San Diego.
Jerry Fuller is a laser technician in the Photonics Technology Department at The Aerospace Corporation. He has worked on components for fiberoptic flight controls, optical tachometers, and industrial and consumer laser products. His skills range from semiconductor fabrication to mechanical design and machining.
Izaak Giberson is a student and woodworker.
Eagle Jones is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Lab at UCLA. He received his B.S. in computer science from Caltech in 2002.
Maribeth Mason received her Ph.D. in applied physics from Caltech in January 2004. Her doctoral dissertation was on fabricating silicon photovoltaics via hot-wire chemical vapor deposition. Currently she works in the Electronics and Photonics Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation. She received her B.S. in material science from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign in 1997, and her M.S. from Caltech in 1999.
Jason Meltzer is a Ph.D. student in computer science at UCLA, where he works in the Computer Vision Lab. He received his B.S. in engineering and applied science from Caltech, where he created a real-time vision system for the Multi-Vehicle Wireless Testbed, an experimental platform for group control of unmanned vehicles. In 2003 he held an internship at the Honda Machine Vision laboratory.
Brent Morgan [Ultrasonic Sensors]
Dr. Brent Morgan received his Ph.D. in material science from UCSD in 1999. He is a member of the technical staff in the Electronics and Photonics Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation, where he does work in surface and interface physics, semiconductor devices, and ion mass spectrometry. He has assisted the previous Golem Group efforts on issues of sensor placement, mounting, and wiring, and has made some preliminary experiments with sonar sensors.
Jim Swenson [Custom Electronics / Emergency Stop System]
Jim Swenson is a 20-year member of the technical staff at The Aerospace Corporation, in the Electronics and Photonics Laboratory. He has worked on process development of GaP microlenses, GaAs FET microwave amps, laser cavity locking, MEMS switches, radar-tagged mini-tethers for pico-satellites, the design and construction of analog/digital/RF/electro-optic circuits, and the repair of power electronics in semiconductor equipment. Jim has contributed much to the electronic design of previous Golem Group vehicles, notably in designing and building the brake circuit, the high-accuracy Hall-sensor-based axle encoder, and the Golem Group’s own remote RF E-stop system.
The Golem Group is an independent effort by its members and is not necessarily endorsed by or affiliated with any of their current or former employers. Current or former employers are listed for background only.