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HEBI Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based creator of a modular platform for robotics development, named Bob Raida its CEO and Dave Rollinson CTO. Howie Choset, who has been acting CEO, has been named chairman of the board. HEBI said this change in leadership reflects its transition from providing technology to researchers to providing solutions to end-users.

Raida began working with HEBI Robotics in 2015, initially as an external business consultant. He became the first full-time employee of HEBI in 2016 as VP of business development. Since 2017 he has been serving as chief operating officer. Prior to joining HEBI, he had been actively involved in the Pittsburgh entrepreneurial community, including as co-founder of TrueCommerce, a producer of business-to-business e-commerce solutions. Raida received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

Rollinson is a co-founder of HEBI Robotics and a key contributor to its modular robotics technology and vision. He studied under Choset at Carnegie Mellon University and received his Ph.D. while researching and developing the key technologies behind HEBI’s platform. Earlier in his career, he worked at RedZone Robotics as a mechanical engineer where he gained insights into the challenges of automation in unpredictable and demanding workspaces.

“I am very excited about the direction of HEBI Robotics,” said Choset, “Since our inception in 2014, we have continued to develop the platform, have saved researchers countless hours of robotics development time, and have vigorously explored next-generation applications where our approach to robotics will have the most immediate impact. We’re now in a place where those efforts have helped us to establish credibility and to gain traction in automation outside of the laboratory.”

“2023 is a pivotal year for HEBI Robotics,” said Raida. “Our long-term vision is to put robot development in the hands of the subject matter experts — the technicians, the farmers, soldiers, and other workers that know what they want to automate but lack the resources to make it happen. We want robots to be just another tool in the toolbox.

“We’ll get there by focusing on key commercial applications that are well addressed by our approach, and continuously evolving the platform to make it more and more effective for an expanding universe of tasks. Some of the projects we’re working on now with our industrial collaborators will dramatically improve the way in which important industrial inspections and maintenance tasks are performed. We look forward to showing more of this work in the coming months and years.”