James J. Kuffner Jr. (born 1971) is an American

roboticist Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integr ...

and chief executive officer (

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

) of Woven Planet Holdings. Dr. Kuffner is also Chief Digital Officer and member of the Board of Directors of

Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on . Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 m ...

. Kuffner continues to serve as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the

Robotics Institute The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014 article in ''Robotics Business Review'' magazine calls it "the world's best robo ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

and as Executive Advisor to Toyota Research Institute. Kuffner earned a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999.

Academic research

Dr. Kuffner is perhaps best known as co-inventor of RRTs and the "RRT-Connect" algorithm developed as part of his Ph.D. research. The RRT-Connect algorithm has become a key standard benchmark for sampling-based exploration of high-dimensional search spaces for robot

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...

. From 1999 until 2001, Kuffner was a

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science The is an Independent Administrative Institution in Japan, established for the purpose of contributing to the advancement of science in all fields of the natural and social sciences and the humanities.JSPSweb page History The Japan Society for ...

(JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

developing software and planning algorithms for

humanoid robots A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other p ...

. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002. Dr. Kuffner is one of the most highly cited authors in the field of Robotics and Motion Planning, with over 15,000 citations. Kuffner has published over 125 technical papers and was issued more than 50 patents related to robotics and computer vision technology. Kuffner received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007.

Google

Kuffner joined

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

in 2009 and was a member of the software engineering team that developed the

Google self-driving car Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. Waymo opera ...

. Kuffner is also known for introducing the term " Cloud Robotics" in 2010 to describe how network-connected robots could take advantage of distributed computation and data stored in the cloud. Kuffner co-founded with

Andy Rubin Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in ...

Google's investments in Robotics technology, built primarily from the acquisition of innovative companies such as

Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Gro ...

, Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka and Redwood Robotics. Kuffner was appointed head of the Robotics division after Andy Rubin's departure from Google in October 2014. In May 2015, Kuffner brought together researchers in robotics, computer vision, and machine learning technology within Google Research to help realize the original Cloud Robotics concept.

Toyota

In Jan 2016, Dr. Kuffner joined the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) where he was appointed the Chief Technology Officer and Area Lead, Cloud Intelligence. In March 2018, Toyota announced a $2.8 billion investment in the creation of a new company, Toyota Research Institute - Advanced Development (TRI-AD), with Dr. Kuffner as chief executive officer (

). TRI-AD is headquartered in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

, and is reported to ultimately employ over 1,000 engineers for the development of software for automated driving and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

References

External links

Woven Planet Holdings Leadership Page

Google Scholar

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuffner, James J. 1971 births Google employees Carnegie Mellon University faculty Living people Stanford University alumni American roboticists American computer scientists