Dr. William "Red" Whittaker leads the Robot City development effort. He is the Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University 's Robotics Institute and the founder of the Field Robotics Center and the Robotics Engineering Consortium. He has been named Pittsburgh's Man of the Year in Technology and honored as one of Science Digest's Top 100 US Innovators. His robotics endeavors have won numerous awards including: the Engelberger Technology Award and the Laurels Award for outstanding achievement from Aviation Week and Space Technology. He is the chief scientist of Workhorse Technologies, a company that pioneers the development of mobile robots for hazardous work environments. He holds 16 patents, has advised 26 Ph.D. students, and is the author/co-author of over 200 publications.

Spencer Spiker is a Principal Research Engineer at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. He is a two year veteran to robotics and automating heavy vehicles.  He headed the operations, logistics, and development of both Carnegie Mellon University’s autonomous Hummers in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.  Spencer was heavily involved in the design and implementation of the intrinsic steer-by-wire for H1ghlander.  Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, Spencer served 13 years in the Army as a Multifunctional Logistician and AH-64A Apache (Attack) Helicopter Test Pilot.  His last assignment included commanding an aviation maintenance unit charged with the intermediate maintenance of all theater attack aviation assets in Asia.  He successfully managed 209 employees, a $10 million operating budget, and $58 million in assets.  Other experience includes research in 1995 with NASA working on Supersonic Flow with Boundary Layer Bleed relating to the High Speed Civil Transport project at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.  Spencer holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the United States Military Academy and attended the Combined Logistics Captain's Career Course, Army Logistics Management College, Fort Lee, Virginia.

Josh Johnston is a Robotics Masters student at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.  He graduated with a degree in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from Duke University in May 2005, where he was president of the robotics club.  In this role, he managed development of Charybdis, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle developed for the AUVSI competition, Wallter, the two-time winner of the CLAWAR autonomous wall-climbing competition in Europe, and was lead engineer for development of a RADAR sensor for CMU’s Red Team for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.  After graduation he migrated to CMU, continued to develop RADAR into a proven technology, and supported system testing and race preparation for Red Team in Pittsburgh and Nevada.

Michael Wagner is a Senior Research Programmer at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. He has seven years of experience designing, building and deploying autonomous field robotics. He has led software development efforts to create robots that discovered meteorites in Antarctica, reasoned about their own solar power while exploring Arctic landscapes, and found life in the barren, Mars-like Atacama Desert in Chile. He has also been lucky enough to travel around the world to field test these robots. Mr. Wagner received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.