Nationality American Institutions CMU
Google Fields Robotics | Name James Kuffner Alma mater Stanford University | |
Known for RRT
OpenRAVE
Cloud Robotics Similar People Sergey Brin, Larry Page, David Drummond, Eric Schmidt | ||
Residence United States of America Doctoral advisor Jean-Claude Latombe | ||
James J. Kuffner, Jr. (born 1971) is an American roboticist and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Technology Officer at Toyota Research Institute. Dr. Kuffner received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999, and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo working on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002.
Kuffner is best known for his work on RRTs for humanoid robot motion planning . The RRT algorithm has become a key benchmark for sampling-based exploration of high-dimensional search spaces for robot motion planning. Kuffner has published over 125 technical papers and was issued more than 40 patents related to robotics and computer vision technology. Kuffner received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007.
Kuffner joined Google in 2009 and was a member of the software engineering team that developed the Google self-driving car. 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 Google's investments in Robotics technology, built primarily from the acquisition of innovative companies such as Boston Dynamics, 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.
In Jan 2016, Kuffner joined the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) where he is currently the Chief Technology Officer and Area Lead, Cloud Intelligence.