Dr. Ryan Eustice

Vice President of Autonomous Driving

Toyota Research Institute (TRI)

Dr. Ryan Eustice is the vice president of autonomous driving at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and head of the TRI Ann Arbor office.

Dr. Eustice received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Ocean Engineering in 2005, and was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 2006 in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering where he additionally holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He remains the Director of the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (PeRL) at U-M.

Dr. Eustice is perhaps best known for his work in advancing large-scale simultaneous localization and mapping, including visual mapping of the RMS Titanic. He has published over 120 technical papers, is the recipient of a NSF CAREER award and ONR Young Investigator Award, and has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, and is widely cited in the mobile robotics literature.

He was a core member of Team IVS in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge (one of 11 finalist teams) and worked collaboratively with Ford Motor Company for over a decade in self-driving vehicle research as a PI at the University of Michigan before joining TRI.