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SEE MORE Click here to watch Paul Perrone introduce Tommy Jr., the autonomous vehicle designed to compete in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. |
How many robotics specialists do you know, here or anywhere, who are on a first name basis with Neil Young? There’s probably only one: Paul Perrone, a Crozet-based engineer who was recruited by the environmentalist rock star to work on a superefficient Lincoln Continental, LincVolt.
“The idea is,” Perrone says, “it’s a Lincoln Continental that can travel across the continent, with an extended range of 500 or so miles.”
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Paul Perrone moved to Crozet in 2004, where his experiments with robots and self-automating cars shifted into high gear. “We were running these robotic cars around the country with cows in the background.” |
This high-profile gig is one of many for Perrone, who’s revered in the Java community (at 3 million developers worldwide, it’s bigger than you might think) for his ability to develop practical applications for the programming language. His superhuman, almost robotic feats include leading teams to create “autonomous ground vehicles”—cars that drive themselves!—at two DARPA challenges. Now he’s working on ways to “to generate perfect 3D images of passing vehicles.”
Though LincVolt hasn’t quite made its goal, Perrone has already been given a Lifetime Achievement award by Sun Microsystems for his Java work. The MAX platform that he developed allows basic manipulation of “rat- to elephant-sized robots,” he says. To say nothing of yak- and giraffe-sized robots.
“I commute in a Lincoln Navigator,” Perrone says. “But I’m looking forward to transitioning this technology into it as soon as humanly possible.”
