Sridhar Lakshmanan

Sridhar Lakshmanan is an Educator, Researcher, and Faculty member at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. He was won many awards for his work at the University. His publication on automotive radars won the 2001 IEEE Best Paper Award from the Vehicular Electronics Society, and widely seen as a pivotal publication that lead to the use of radar for autonomous driving. In 2015, he was interviewed and extensively quoted as an expert in a Time magazine article on Driverless Cars. Sridhar is also and an inventor and entrepreneur. In 2002, two years before the DARPA Grand Challenge his company M-Vision, Inc. fielded a system to steer a 20-ton driverless U.S. Army Stryker vehicle at highway speeds. This system met Army’s Advanced Technology Demonstration performance requirements, and was the featured plenary live video-feed for 25,000 attendees at the 2002 AUSA Annual Meeting – the largest land power exposition and professional development forum in North America. Finally, Sridhar is a mentor. He mentored the City of Detroit’s Public Lighting Department during the City’s bankruptcy (the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history). His D’Light project plan for the City lead to the biggest one-time overhaul of streetlights in the U.S. Detroit’s new street lighting system is seen as the most obvious symbol of this iconic City’s renewal, and was featured in a primetime Citicorp network commercial. Sridhar got his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst in 1991.