Overview

Management Team

Mr. Jim Lowrie, President & Founder

As president of PercepTek, Mr. Lowrie is responsible for establishing the strategic vision and direction of PercepTek and managing the overall health of the corporation.

Mr. Lowrie has 29 years experience in the robotics industry and is a recognized expert in overall autonomous system design and development. Lowrie founded PercepTek Corp. with the primary objective of increasing the level of system intelligence on military and commercial systems. Key career accomplishments include PI for the Army Autonomous Collaborative Operations program, Chief Systems Engineer for the Mars Surveyor Program involving two interplanetary spacecraft, Program Manager for Autonomous Land Vehicle, Chief Engineer for the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, and head of the Machine Intelligence Group at Martin Marietta.

Mr. Lowrie received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. William Klarquist, Vice President of Engineering, Co-Founder

Dr. Klarquist manages the engineering resources and assures the quality of technical work across all programs. He also establishes engineering standards and implements engineering processes and procedures to assure a high level of consistent quality.

Dr. Klarquist is also the program manager and lead engineer on several programs focused on perception and autonomous navigation. Dr. Klarquist has extensive experience in computer vision and autonomous ground robotics. He has worked on a wide array of UGV technologies, ranging from on-road operation to Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA) for detection and tracking of vehicles at a distance.

Dr. Klarquist earned a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. Mark Rosenblum, Vice President of Advanced Programs, Co-Founder

As the Vice President of Advanced Programs, Mr. Rosenblum is responsible for identifying, pursuing, and managing activities that address current market needs. Mr. Rosenblum's expertise is in computer vision and autonomous ground robotics. He has developed learning based systems for autonomous road following and feature classification and has integrated these components onto numerous robotic platforms.

Mr. Rosenblum earned a MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park, a MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987, and a BS in General Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Mark Allmen, Senior Research Scientist

Dr. Allmen leads the development of autonomous object detection and tracking algorithms and autonomous video surveillance systems at PercepTek. His area of expertise is in unmanned vehicle perception research and development for fully utilizing the motion in a video sequence for object recognition. This framework can be used to detect, track and analyze objects of interest from video. Dr. Allmen previously was the principal scientist with Object Video, a research scientist for Space Imaging and a software engineer at Lockheed Martin Astronautics.

Dr. Allmen received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, his MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin and his BS from University of Michigan in Computer Science.

Mr. Steve VanHooser, Director of Operations

Mr. VanHooser provides corporate operations control including contract management, program operations management and financial oversight for the corporation.

Prior to joining PercepTek, VanHooser spent 15 years at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in program planning and control. While at Lockheed Martin, he participated in a three-year rotation internship program, spending time in the major components of business control and management.

Mr. VanHooser received his BS in Natural Science from Colorado State University and attended Regis University in their MBA, Program Control program.