Tekin Mericli
CTO
Locomation
Dr. Tekin Meriçli is a well-rounded roboticist with in-depth expertise in machine intelligence and learning, perception, planning, and manipulation. He is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Locomation. Formerly he was a Special Faculty / Commercialization Specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) of the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where he was a Senior Robotics Engineer before. At NREC, he has assumed various responsibilities including lead engineer role to make major contributions to projects on autonomous and semi-autonomous ground vehicles (CAT Pathfinder), mapping, state estimation, and operator assist systems (FHWA Snowplow), perception and motion planning for aerial robots (DARPA ALIAS), search and rescue robots (CHIMP for DARPA Robotics Challenge), and industrial automation and process improvement (Harsco). Prior to
joining NREC as full-time staff, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at CMU, leading the efforts on building intuitive and expressive interfaces to interact with semi-autonomous robotic
systems that are intended to assist elderly and disabled, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the RI at CMU, leading the Assistive Dexterous Arm (ADA) project at the Personal Robotics Lab, and working on the high degree-of-freedom manipulation planning skills of the CHIMP robot at NREC for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and his MSCS degree from the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. His research interests include intelligent mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, robot perception, planning at multiple abstraction levels, applied machine learning, multi-agent systems, developmental and cognitive robotics, and computational neuroscience. He has over 40 publications in these areas, including best paper award recipients. For over a decade, he has worked on various robotic platforms including soccer-playing quadrupeds and bipeds, wheeled tour guide and service robots, autonomous wheelchairs, intelligent assistive robotic manipulators, state-of-the-art search and rescue robots, and autonomous urban and military ground vehicles. His knowledge and expertise in developing robust and efficient robotic systems have been sharpened through his participation in and contribution to various intelligent robotics competitions such as RoboCup, the DARPA Urban Challenge, the MAGIC UGV Competition, and the DARPA Robotics
Challenge. He has also been very active in AI and robotics communities, serving as a referee and programme committee member of over 30 conferences and journals as well as co-organizing several national and international workshops, conferences, and competitions, including the RoboCup 2011 Istanbul event. He also serves on the Internal Advisory Board of the International RoboCup Federation. More information on his work can be found on his website at https://tekin.mericli.com.