Dr. Omead Amidi, CTO

Dr. Amidi is a co-founder of SkEyes Unlimited and research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. His main area of focus is Aerial Robotics technologies, including embedded control and sensing, image processing, and autonomous navigation. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 1994, to lead the “Reconfigurable Vision Machine” project. Within this project he built computer vision hardware and implemented a number of inspection systems for high-speed bottle defect detection. Subsequent projects in which he participated include “Space Positioning and Attitude Computing Engine for Homing Orbiting Gadgetry,” designed to aid astronauts in homing and mating large pieces of the International Space Station; and the “Eyevision” video capture system, which controls an array of cameras surrounding an event and was used at Superbowl XXXV in Tampa, Florida, in January 2001. Since 1996 Dr. Amidi is in charge of the Autonomous Helicopter Laboratory at CMU. His team built the first autonomous helicopter which can fly solely based on on-board visual feedback, and a number of autonomous systems ranging from small electrical models to mid- sized (14 ft) industrial helicopters. The larger helicopters can autonomously takeoff, fly to waypoints, carry out a mapping or surveillance mission, and return home to land. The helicopters have carried out the first real-time air/ground collaborative mission where the aerial system helps unmanned ground vehicles traverse challenging terrain. Its custom-built on-board mapping system can rapidly build accurate 3D maps of environments. Dr. Amidi earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996, with a dissertation entitled “An Autonomous Vision-Guided Helicopter.”

Dr. James Ryan Miller

Dr. Miller is a co-founder of SkEyes Unlimited and research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. His work focuses on sensor design and development for terrain modeling and aerial surveillance. He has been a member of CMU’s Autonomous Helicopter Laboratory since 1996. In 2002, Dr. Miller worked on the Motion Free Scanning Radar project, a novel millimeter-wave radar sensor design for robotic vehicles. He currently designs and develops custom scanning laser rangefinder systems for terrain modeling and obstacle detection. Dr. Miller earned his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002, with a dissertation entitled “A 3D Color Terrain Modeling System for Small Autonomous Helicopters.”

Todd Dudek

Mr. Dudek is a co-founder of SkEyes Unlimited and research staff member of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. His work focuses on system design, modeling, and implementation. Mr. Dudek is SkEyes’s safety pilot, with more than 30 years of experience with unmanned helicopter piloting and maintenance.