Rick Brown – CEO and Founder
A 25-year veteran of the industrial automation industry, is the founder and CEO of Lightfoot Inc. Rick is also the founder and CEO of Lucas Systems, Pittsburgh’s seventh-fastest growing company and second-fastest growing technology company in 2004. Earlier in his career, Rick served as Director of R&D for a multi-billion dollar engineering company. In this capacity he directed large-scale agile robotics projects jointly with Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Rick later had operational responsibility for engineering groups performing robotics development for Department of Defense applications.
Rick has been able to leverage his extensive customer base through Lucas to help steer the customer-driven design of the Lightfoot Agilis system.
Derek Jeremias – Vice President of R&D
B.S in Computer Science – University of Central Florida
Derek has 15 years of experience in enterprise class applications and brings expertise in all aspects of software development from architecture to process to project and customer management. He has held leadership positions most recently in FreeMarkets (now Ariba), where he managed architects and developers both locally and offshore in the development of their enterprise sourcing product, and Nokia where he managed development teams in the US and in Finland as well as in cooperation with several other divisions within Nokia on their push email solution.
Derek is responsible for the on-going development and deployment of Lightfoot's automation solutions.
Dan O’Halloran – Principal Engineer
M.S. in Mechanical Engineering – Carnegie Mellon University 2003 (NSF Fellow)
B.S in Mechanical Engineering – University of Florida 1999 (Four-Year Scholar)
Dan is an alumnus of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, which he attended under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. During his professional career he has applied his Mechanical Engineering degrees to a broad range of engineering projects including the hydrogen fuel pump on the space shuttle, the F119 jet engine powering the Air Force’s latest F22 Raptor, a maglev haptic interface device, a modular mini-robotic factory system, and various mobile robotic applications.
At Lightfoot Dan is in charge of the engineering efforts involved in realizing Lightfoot’s unique warehouse robotic storage and retrieval system. During his tenure Dan has completely redesigned the entire mechanical system of the robot to achieve improved performance, higher maintainability, and reduced cost. Like all members of the small Lightfoot team, Dan has had in extensive role in all phases of the development, from design, to fabrication and assembly, to testing and verification.