John M. Dolan

Timeline

1. 1980–1991

   Mechanical engineering degrees and CMU faculty

   He receives a BSE in mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1980, followed by an ME in 1987 and a PhD in 1991 in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1991, he joins the faculty of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.

2. 2006–2007

   NASA rover telesupervision and Cyberscout

   In March 2006, he coauthors "Human Telesupervision of a Fleet of Autonomous Robots for Safe and Efficient Space Exploration" with Gregg Podnar, Alberto Elfes, Marcel Bergerman, H. Benjamin Brown and Alan D. Guisewite for the ACM SIGCHI/SIGART Human-Robot Interaction conference, describing a robot supervision architecture developed under NASA auspices. His NASA project Wide-Area Prospecting Using Supervised Autonomous Robots creates a telesupervision system in which a single astronaut in a shirtsleeve environment controls multiple prospecting rovers. By 2007, he also serves as principal investigator for DARPA's Cyberscout and NASA's Wide-Area Multirobot Prospecting projects.

3. 2007–2008

   Boss and the Urban Challenge

   As a Senior Systems Scientist at the Robotics Institute, he leads the Behaviors team for Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and the team's autonomous SUV, Boss, wins first place and the $2 million grand prize in Victorville, California, in November 2007. In June 2008, he coauthors "Autonomous driving in urban environments: Boss and the Urban Challenge" in the Journal of Field Robotics, which describes a three-layer planning system combining mission, behavioral and motion planning.

4. 2015

   MRSD leadership and Cadillac SRX demo

   In 2015, Dolan begins leading Carnegie Mellon's Master of Science in Robotic Systems Development program. During a June 2015 test drive on Route 19 in Cranberry, he demonstrates CMU's Cadillac SRX by switching the car between autonomous and human modes.

5. May 2024

   Planning over discrete driving modes

   In May 2024, he coauthors "Tractable Joint Prediction and Planning over Discrete Behavior Modes for Urban Driving" with Adam Villaflor, Brian Yang, Huangyuan Su, Katerina Fragkiadaki and Jeff Schneider for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The paper proposes reactive closed-loop planning over discrete latent modes to model causal interactions between agents and outperforms the previous state of the art in CARLA on dense traffic scenarios at realistic speeds.

6. January 2025

   F1Tenth demo for Pete Buttigieg

   In January 2025, Dolan serves as faculty adviser to four students and demonstrates the F1Tenth Autonomous Racing Course to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during a visit to Carnegie Mellon.

7. May 2025

   AnyCar universal dynamics model

   With Wenli Xiao, Haoru Xue, Tony Tao, Dvij Kalaria and Guanya Shi, he coauthors "AnyCar to Anywhere: Learning Universal Dynamics Model for Agile and Adaptive Mobility" for ICRA in May 2025. The paper introduces AnyCar, a transformer-based generalist dynamics model for agile control of wheeled robots that fine-tunes on few-shot real-world data for zero-shot transfer across vehicles, environments and state-estimation methods.

8. As of October 2026

   Principal systems scientist at CMU

   On the Robotics Institute faculty since 1991, he is a Principal Systems Scientist working on autonomous driving and robot reliability in the CMU Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research and the Driverless Intelligent Vehicles Lab. He directs the Master of Science in Robotic Systems Development and Robotics Institute Summer Scholars programs, and he is a co-founder of three startups: Ottomatika, Discovery Robotics and Retrofit AI.