The Impact of Unmanned Systems:
From the Battlefield to the Consumer World

Francis Govers

Autonomy Lead, Advanced Vertical Lift Systems, Bell Flight

Francis is the designer of more than 30 unmanned land, sea, air, and space vehicles. He currently works at Bell Flight as autonomy lead for Advanced Vertical Lift Systems. He is an Air Force veteran, was head of command and control for the International Space Station, deputy chief engineer for Unmanned Systems at the U.S. Army Future Combat Systems, participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and managed a Zeppelin airship. He designed RAMSEE, the robot security guard, as chief robotics officer of Gamma 2 Robotics. As VP of Engineering at Sportvision, he was responsible for the “yellow line” for NFL football and designed the TV telemetry system for NASCAR and IndyCar. He has published 45 magazine articles and authored the book Artificial Intelligence for Robotics, available from Packt Publishing.

He is highly active in STEM education outreach programs such as the Bell Vertical Robotics Competition. He received five outstanding achievement awards from NASA, the Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society, and recognition from Scientific American for “World Changing Ideas.”

Matt Jones

Chief Systems Architect, Wind River Systems
Product Marketing Lead, GENIVI Alliance

Matt Jones is the chief systems architect at Wind River^® in a role spanning safety-critical real-time, Linux, and cloud products. Matt recently departed Virgin Hyperloop One, where as senior vice president he led the Software Engineering teams and was tasked with providing all the software needed to manage, control, and operate an autonomous hyperloop system. This included embedded software and electronics, networking, cloud data and services, and customer-facing applications.

Previously he was the chief product officer with moovel Group, Daimler’s mobility subsidiary. He was focused on integrating personal, shared, and public transportation options into single-view mobility products. In this role he prepared the way for connected, autonomous, shared electric vehicles launching in many cities across the U.S. and E.U.

Prior to that he spent almost 14 years at Jaguar Land Rover as the director of Future Technology, leading development of electronic and software systems for future connected autonomous vehicles. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation.