Jon Morris, President, JDQ Systems Inc.

Jon Morris is an accomplished business owner with 25 years of experience in the application of technology to improve business processes. Jon has an MBA from the Ivey School of Business and is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer and Certified Six Sigma Black Belt. Jon’s experience extends from the implementation of formal quality systems for ISO 9001 registration, through the implementation of Lean Six Sigma methods, to software application design to support continual improvement efforts. As a principal of JDQ, Jon continues to consult on strategic improvement initiatives while providing leadership to the 3Spheres Robotics Project team based on quality and Agile principles.

Derek Shackleford, Principal, JDQ Systems Inc.

Derek Shackleford has held senior management positions in the technology and manufacturing sectors, and brings considerable management experience to JDQ. With a background in database design, Derek has focused on the design and implementation of systems to support business improvement including activity based costing and production management systems, sales activity tracking, document management, and corrective action systems. Derek has directed the custom application development activities of JDQ on a day-to-day basis for over 20 years. The design and development of custom collaborative service robots is a natural progression of Derek’s craft and expertise.

Delun Chen, MASc

Delun’s work focuses on the industrial design of Aether 2.0. The goal is to improve the appearance of the Aether robot and develop a user-friendly enclosure that is also compatible with Aether’s core functionalities. Delun iterates through four development cycles to ideate conceptual prototypes. The robot candidates with different combinations of contours, lines and colours are created using CAID techniques. To maximize user acceptance of the Aether 2.0 industrial design, a user-centered approach, using virtual reality, is applied to collect user feedback in a safe and healthy manner.

Sina Radmard, PhD

Sina has managed the research aspect of the project while working directly with the rest of the researchers. He has successfully applied for numerous governmental and non-governmental grants that continue to allow us to build a talented research team over the years. On the technical side, he has worked on all aspects of the project ranging from autonomous navigation to visual recognition to voice/visual interaction to hardware/software integration and conducting user studies.

Camilo Perez Quintero, PhD

During his time with the project Camilo focused on: 1) Providing Aether with the capacity to detect, localize, and avoid small objects in its surrounding. He developed and integrated into the robot software pipeline a computer vision algorithm to deal with small objects laying on the ground, e.g., shoes, purse, glasses, keys, etc. 2) Providing Aether with the capacity of controlling its speed based on house zones. For instance, every time the robot goes through a door it has to reduce the velocity to avoid tipping due to the door sill plate. 3) Restructuring Aether software packages to overcome problems with sensor delays and to provide an easier deployment of software on multiple platforms.
Current position: CTO and Co-founder of YPC Technologies.

Lucas Porto, BASc

Lucas developed the face recognition and voice interaction systems that allowed Aether to interact with and approach clients. His work focused on training and deploying machine learning algorithms and creating pipelines for simultaneous processing of visual and dialog data.
Current position: Master’s student at the University of British Columbia, working on applied machine learning in medical imaging.