Team Members

Our team at Carnegie Mellon includes roboticists, computer scientists, designers, and engineers. Their diverse talents, experience, and expertise will help make the TeRK project a success.

H. Ben Brown is a Project Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the designer of the single-legged hopping robots of the Raibert Leg Laboratory which eventually moved from Carnegie Mellon to M.I.T. Ben is responsible for the TeRK robots' mechanical design.

Jason Campbell is a Senior Researcher at Intel Research's Pittsburgh Labratory. His current research efforts include vision-based guidance of mobile robots and massively-scalable modular robotics.

Carl DiSalvo is a PhD Candidate in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and also an Associate Fellow at The Studio for Creative Inquiry. Carl will be contributing to the TerK team in the areas of interaction and communication design.

Geoffrey Dixon-Ernst is an undergraduate in the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department. He is a graduate of Winchester Thurston High School. Geoff works on TeRK robot software and firmware development.

Brian Dunlavey is a research staff member at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. He is a former robot programmer at Mobot, Inc. Brian leads the development of embedded firmware for TeRK.

Lei “Ray” Feng is a graduate student in the Master of Information Systems Management Program at Carnegie Mellon. He is a former firmware developer for Philips’ ARM-processor cellular telephones. Ray works on embedded firmware for TeRK.

Emily Hamner is Senior Research Associate for the Mobile Robot Programming Lab at CMU. She served as the research and execution hub of the Personal Rover Project and will fill the same role for TeRK. Emily leads development of the community curriculum and TeRK web resources.

Tom Lauwers is a PhD student in Robotics and was previously president of the Robotics Club at Carnegie Mellon. He is also a founder of Botrics, LLC. Tom leads the educational material development effort together with partner institutions.

Anish Mampetta is a Masters student at the Robotics Institute. He is the MechE of the group. Anish is involved with design, development, and testing of robot recipes for TeRK.

Zack Menegakis is a Masters student in Electrical & Computer Engineering and his studies have included hardware design and optimization. He has pursued competative robotics as a hobby and currently works on TeRK robot simulations.

Illah Nourbakhsh is Associate Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the former Robotics Group lead for NASA / Ames Research Center and a co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at CMU. Illah is the Principal Investigator of the TeRK Project.

Steven Shamlian is an undergraduate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. He is the president of the CMU Robotics Club. Steve is involved with design, development, and testing of robot recipes for TeRK.