Clark Haynes

Clark Haynes has a strong background in robotics and autonomous systems. Clark is currently the Founder and CEO of velo.ai, a company they established in 2021. Prior to this, they worked at Aurora as a Senior Staff Autonomy Engineer and Tech Lead Manager from January 2021 to September 2021.

Before joining Aurora, Clark was at Uber for six years, starting in July 2015. Clark held various roles there, including Prediction Team Lead, Staff Autonomy Engineer, and Senior Manager. During their time at Uber, they led a team of 30 and played a critical role in developing state-of-the-art methods for predicting real-world interactions between self-driving vehicles and road users.

From 2011 to 2015, Clark worked at the National Robotics Engineering Center, Carnegie Mellon University. Clark served as Software Lead for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and also worked as a Commercialization Specialist. Clark led a team of 12 and successfully completed the challenge with their robot, CHIMP, which placed third out of 25 teams. Additionally, Clark contributed to projects like DARPA LS3 and conducted research on topological control methods.

Clark started their career in 2002 at Carnegie Mellon University as a Graduate Student Research Assistant, focusing on behavior development for the RiSE climbing robot. During this time, they also worked as a Visiting Graduate Student Research Assistant at Boston Dynamics in 2006.

Clark holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and previously worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2011. Clark conducted research into topology-based control for robotics and led the development of several robot platforms. Clark began their research career in 2000 as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the University of Michigan.

Clark Haynes received their BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan from 1998 to 2002. Clark then pursued a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2008.