Donald Hutson

CTO at ModalAi Inc.

San Diego County, California, United States

About Donald Hutson

Donald Hutson is CTO at ModalAi Inc. Location: San Diego County, California, United States.

I am a founder and CTO of a new tech startup called ModalAi Inc. located in San Diego. I have partnered with the former head of software at Qualcomm research, Chad Sweet, to help bring our very compact robotic perception solution to the masses. From early 2013 to 2018, I was the Lead Mechanical Engineer for Qualcomm Robotics Research project. I was part of a small team of mechanical engineers that help showcase various robotic use cases of the Qualcomm's Snapdragon Processor. Including, machine learning, autonomous navigation, tracking and 3D mapping for robots and drones. My responsibility's included CAD/CAM, fabrication, building and maintaining a fleet of custom drone and ground-based robotic reference designs. Before Qualcomm, I worked for over 13 years, as a robotics design engineer and machinist for the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. My primary job was to build custom Brain-based Robots that would learn and develop associations between different robotic modalities such as vision, touch, sound, and taste in the same way as rats. I worked at CORAM Healthcare for 9 years as a Rehab Repair Specialist in the home medical field. My main tasks consisted of certifying and repairing rented medical equipment such as oxygen concentrators, apnea monitors, infusion pumps, custom mobility and the electronic interface needs of people with disabilities. For 7 years, I worked at Custom Awning Company. I designed, welded and installed extremely complex and custom tubular frames for awnings. Additionally, I designed, patterned, and sewed the large canvas covers. Since 1996, I have designed, built and competed fighting robots for TV in competitions such as Robot Wars, Battlebots, and Combots. My team, Mutant Robots, most recently competed on Discovery channel's new Battlebots competition, filmed in April 2018, with our new 250-pound robot called, LockJaw R3. I have been a Lead Mentor for the FIRST robotics team (1572) at Kearney High school for over 13 years.

Skills

  • Robotics
  • CAD/CAM
  • Mechanical Engineering

Additional experience

  • Senior Staff/Support Engineer (specializing in robotics)

    Qualcomm

    Started July 2013

Education

  • , San Diego Miramar College