Ragunathan Rajkumar

Timeline

1. 1984–1989

   A Madras degree and CMU doctorate

   He earns a bachelor's degree in electronics and communications engineering from the University of Madras in 1984. Carnegie Mellon awards his master's degree in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1989, both in computer engineering.

2. 1991

   Real-time scheduling theory

   In August 1991, Springer Verlag publishes his book "Synchronization in Real-Time Systems: A Priority Inheritance Approach". With John Lehoczky and Lui Sha, he develops generalized rate-monotonic scheduling (GRMS) theory over two decades, and it is implemented in the International Space Station, the Mars Pathfinder and, more recently, autonomous vehicles.

3. 2000

   Co-founding TimeSys

   As cofounder and chairman of the Pittsburgh embedded-Linux company TimeSys, he sees it release version 1.1 of its real-time Linux distribution, TimeSys Linux/RT, in May 2000, with priority inheritance support in the kernel. He is named among the original contributors of the techniques that address the unbounded priority inversion that nearly failed NASA's Mars Pathfinder Rover mission in 1997.

4. 2007

   Tartan Racing wins Urban Challenge

   He leads the Systems Engineering group of Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team and sits on its three-member executive committee as the team wins the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. He is among the coauthors of the 2008 Journal of Field Robotics paper on Boss, the autonomous vehicle that wins the challenge.

5. 2012

   Named an IEEE Fellow

   IEEE names him a Fellow in its class of 2012 for contributions to predictable real-time systems and operating systems. He is then co-director of the General Motors-CMU Collaborative Research Laboratories.

6. 2013–2015

   Founding Ottomatika

   He founds Ottomatika in December 2013 to develop a complete software stack for autonomous vehicles. Delphi invests in the Carnegie Mellon spinoff in November 2014 and acquires it in July 2015. In April 2015, a Delphi vehicle running the combined Delphi and Ottomatika software completes a 3,400-mile trip from San Francisco to New York in autonomous mode 99 percent of the time.

7. 2016

   The Simon Ramo Medal

   He shares the 2016 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, announced in December 2015, with John Lehoczky and Lui Sha. The medal recognizes technical leadership and contributions to fundamental theory, practice and standardization for engineering real-time systems.

8. As of October 2026

   Directing Metro21 and Safety21

   He is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, is affiliated with the Robotics Institute, and directs the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute. In 2023, Carnegie Mellon wins a $20 million, five-year US Department of Transportation grant to establish the Safety21 University Transportation Center under his leadership, and he is still its director in January 2025.