Matthew Johnson-Roberson

Timeline

1. 2004–2005

   DARPA races and a CMU degree

   As a computer science undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, he gets involved in the DARPA Grand Challenges, desert races for driverless vehicles, and he works on autonomous vehicles from the first race in 2004. He earns his bachelor's degree in computer science in 2005.

2. 2010–2013

   Reef robots and a Sydney PhD

   He earns a doctorate in robotics at the University of Sydney in 2010, working on robots that inspect deep water and coral reefs, including Ningaloo Reef and the Great Barrier Reef. Postdoctoral appointments follow at Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics and at the Centre for Autonomous Systems of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

3. 2013–2015

   Michigan faculty and the DROP Lab

   He joins the University of Michigan College of Engineering in 2013 in the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering department, with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Engineering. There he founds the DROP (Deep Robot Optical Perception) Lab for 3D reconstruction, segmentation, data mining and visualization, and in 2015 he receives an NSF CAREER award for 3D reconstruction in underwater environments with autonomous underwater vehicles.

4. 2016

   The Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles

   In September 2016, Ford and the University of Michigan name him and Ram Vasudevan leaders of a new autonomous vehicle research team; he is an assistant professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the time. With Vasudevan, he co-directs the UM Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles, a $25 million partnership that leads to a new facility on the Michigan campus.

5. 2017

   The Driving in the Matrix paper

   He and five coauthors, including Ram Vasudevan, publish "Driving in the Matrix" in the proceedings of ICRA 2017. The paper trains a state-of-the-art vehicle detector only on annotated images from a photo-realistic simulation engine, and the detector outperforms the identical architecture trained on human-annotated real-world data on the KITTI data set.

6. 2019–2021

   Co-founding Refraction AI

   He co-founds Refraction AI, a last-mile delivery robotics company, and serves as its CTO. Its four-foot-tall robots deliver food and other goods to customers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 2019 and expand to Austin, Texas, in 2021.

7. 2022–2025

   Director of CMU's Robotics Institute

   In November 2021, Carnegie Mellon names him the sixth director of its Robotics Institute, succeeding interim director Srinivasa Narasimhan. He leads the institute from January 2022 to April 2025, and in 2024 he runs a department with a budget of more than $100 million and oversees a $45 million Richard King Mellon Foundation grant to build CMU's new Robotics Innovation Center.

8. Since May 2025

   Inaugural dean at Vanderbilt

   He becomes the inaugural dean of Vanderbilt University's College of Connected Computing, the university's first new college in more than 40 years, in May 2025, and a University Distinguished Professor with appointments in the college and the School of Engineering. In February 2026, the college launches the Amplify Generative AI Innovation Center for generative and agentic AI in research, teaching and campus operations.