Dr Martinson received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. Awarded a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship, he spent two years working, researching and mentoring students in Kharkiv, Ukraine after graduation. Since then, he has worked for a number of industries including autonomous cars (Toyota ITC), the defense department, as both a postdoctoral fellow (Naval Research Laboratory) and a DoD contractor (Soar Technology), and for home robotics (Toyota and iRobot).

Broadly defined, Dr Martinson’s research interests can be classified as computational perception and machine learning, particularly as applied to robotic sensing. Within this umbrella, he has been funded to investigate and publish on a range of topics, including:

• Object detection and mapping with semi-supervised learning (Soar Technology, iRobot)
• Human Interfaces for Level 2-3 Autonomous Cars (Soar Technology)
• Distributed sensor networks (Soar Technology)
• Future state prediction (Soar Technology, Toyota ITC)
• Learning and motion planning for mobile manipulators (Toyota, HRL – General Motors)
• Multi-modal person recognition (US Naval Research Laboratory)
• Mobile robotic mapping (Georgia Tech, Kharkov National University of Radio-Electronics)

Over the course of his career, Dr Martinson has generated 13 patents (plus one pending) and 46 peer reviewed publications. He has also helped to secure $5.7M in awarded contracts in machine learning and robotics as the lead author / investigator. And most recently, while at iRobot, Dr Martinson was team leader responsible for upgrading the object detection system currently used by more than a million robots around the world.