Industry Sponsor
Eric Reiners
Eric has been at Caterpillar Inc. for over 20 years managing the automation systems R&D and the autonomy departments at Caterpillar during his time. He graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1989 with his Bachelor’s in Engineering. Eric also has worked with NASA and the DoD during his time with Caterpillar, supporting events such as the NASA Robotic Mining Competition and acting as the point of contact with the orginizations.
Academic Advisor
Ji Zhang
Ji Zhang is a Systems Scientist in the Field Robotics Center and NREC. He received his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2017. Dr. Zhang has been immensely influential with his work in navigation, mapping, localization, planning, and exploration. In particular, his work on Lidar Odometry and Mapping (LOAM) has been highly influential in efforts towards SLAM and robotics research. He also founded Kaarta Inc, a CMU spin-off specializing in 3D mapping & modelling technologies and worked there for 4 years.
Students
Chris Klammer
Chris is a first year Master’s in Computer Vision (MSCV) student at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2019-2022, he worked as an Image Scientist for L3 Harris Technologies solving problems related to image processing, computer vision, and automatic target recognition (ATR). Chris now has chosen to concentrate his efforts in computer vision, robotics, and embodied navigation research while at CMU.
weijie lin
Weijie is a first-year Master’s student in Computer Vision at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he worked at Simon Fraser University’s GrUVi Research Lab, where he developed a full-stack web-based tool for rapid 3D scene reconstruction from panoramic images. With expertise in 3D reconstruction, deep learning, and 3D vision, Weijie’s role in the capstone project involves conducting baseline experiments and collaborating with Chris to create innovative methods.