Dan Helmick is director of Mobile Manipulation at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The team’s mission is to help solve the challenges faced by an aging society. Helmick brings over two decades of experience developing software and hardware for autonomous mobile manipulators.

Prior to joining TRI, Helmick worked at Boston Dynamics on humanoid robots and at Google X where his team developed mobile manipulators to provide utility and add value in real-world, human environments. Before that, he worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for fifteen years, where he acted as the principal investigator and task lead for many pivotal NASA and DARPA robotics research projects and the Mars Science Laboratory mission (the Curiosity rover).  

Helmick earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech and a M.S. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech.