Primary Job Title Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer Primary Organization Atlas Robotics
Location Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States Regions Great Lakes, Northeastern US Gender Male
Website tekin.mericli.com/ LinkedIn View on LinkedIn X (Twitter) View on X
Dr. Tekin Mericli is a roboticist with more than 25 years of experience and expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent mobile robotics. He's also a published author with over 40 publications, including several best paper award winners.
He is currently a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Atlas Robotics
carrying out the mission of building the world's best AI forklift operation. Previously, he was a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Locomation, a provider of safe and reliable automated driving technologies for the ground transportation industry.
Before founding Locomation, he worked as a Senior Robotics Engineer and Special Faculty/Commercialization Specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) of the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Prior to NREC, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the RI at CMU, he led the development of intuitive and expressive interfaces for semi-autonomous robotic systems designed to assist the elderly and disabled. He also worked on the motion and manipulation planning capabilities of NREC's CHIMP robot, which placed third in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Turkey, where his thesis contributed a case-based mobile manipulation framework. He also hold an MSCS degree from The University of Texas at Austin and a BS degree in Computer Engineering from Marmara University in Turkey.
Since 2004, he's been an active member of the RoboCup community. He contributed to and led research and development pursued within Cerberus and UT Austin Villa RoboCup Standard Platform League robot soccer teams. He also served as a member of the technical and organizing committees of several RoboCup events and as the general co-chair of the RoboCup 2011 Istanbul event. Additionally, he was a technical lead of the UT-Austin Robot Technology DARPA Urban Challenge team. In essence, he was at the epicenter of the "big bang" of the self-driving vehicle revolution, helping build the foundations of this technology. He was also a technical lead of Team Cappadocia, developing a multi-robot ground vehicle system to carry out a surveillance and reconnaissance mission in a dynamic urban environment, which placed fourth in the MAGIC 2010 competition.
If you want to learn more about his accomplishments and expertise, feel free to check out his website at http://tekin.mericli.com.
