Summary
Kevin Peterson is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Bedrock Robotics, leading core autonomy technology development for the company’s retrofit construction-equipment systems. He previously spent three years as Head of Perception for Waymo Via, Waymo’s commercial trucking division, and before that co-founded Marble Robot, a robotics startup acquired by Caterpillar in 2020.
Career
Peterson holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of CMU’s DARPA Urban Challenge-winning team that developed the first autonomous car to successfully drive itself in traffic in 2007. As part of that effort, he was responsible for developing camera-, lidar-, and radar-based road tracking and hazard detection systems, including sensor selection and positioning, algorithm design and implementation, and system testing. He also contributed to initial architecture studies to design the overall perception and planning architecture for the vehicle (LinkedIn).
Following the Urban Challenge, Peterson continued at CMU as a Ph.D. student, working on novel machine-learning algorithms for predicting motion in dynamic environments — specifically, pedestrian and crowd motion — using inverse reinforcement learning to understand actors’ preferences and predict their likely trajectories. He also conducted early studies on visually guided lunar landing for Astrobotic, a Google Lunar XPRIZE team, work that formed the basis for his long-term involvement with the company (LinkedIn).
Peterson later served as CTO of Astrobotic Technology, partnering with NASA to design and build spacecraft for landing on the Moon and Mars, and developing innovative techniques for asteroid mining, precision lunar landing, and camera-only interplanetary navigation. His work at Astrobotic has been featured in several books and documentaries, including “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car,” NOVA’s “The Great Robot Race,” and Morgan Freeman’s “The New Space Race” (Crunchbase).
In March 2016, Peterson co-founded Marble Robot, a robotics company focused on autonomous delivery systems capable of navigating sidewalks and urban environments. He served as CEO and Head of Software until Caterpillar acquired Marble in December 2018, integrating its technology into Caterpillar’s construction, quarry, industrial, and waste product lines. Peterson then worked as an Autonomy Architect at Caterpillar for seven months before joining Waymo (LeadDev; Crunchbase).
At Waymo, Peterson served as Head of Perception for Waymo Via, the company’s autonomous trucking division. In a 2025 interview, he described his work on building large, adaptable machine-learning models rather than many small, decoupled, task-specific models — an approach he recounted required only about 10% more truck-specific data to adapt a model originally designed for cars to work well for trucking. He has emphasized the importance of operational excellence and collaborative team dynamics in developing safe, autonomous AI/ML systems (LeadDev).
Peterson left Waymo in 2024 to co-found Bedrock Robotics alongside Boris Sofman, Ajay Gummalla, and Tom Eliaz. As CTO, he leads the company’s core autonomy technology, applying his experience from self-driving cars and construction machinery to tackle what he and co-founder Ajay Gummalla have described as one of the hardest automation challenges: excavators. In a podcast interview, Peterson explained Bedrock’s strategy of starting with narrow scopes — such as mass excavation — to achieve near-human productivity levels, then expanding to the many other tasks excavators perform (The Road to Autonomy).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Kevin Peterson’s LinkedIn, his LeadDev community profile and a LeadDev article on his ML scaling lessons, a transcript of his appearance on The Road to Autonomy podcast, and his Crunchbase profile. Some details of his early academic work and his time at Astrobotic and Marble are self-reported on LinkedIn and have not been independently corroborated beyond third-party business databases.