Summary
Mikhail Jones is a co-founder of Agility Robotics and the company’s vice president of software engineering, leading control-software development since the company’s founding in 2015.
Career
Jones completed a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University in 2011, then continued at the university for a Master of Science in robotics, entering Jonathan Hurst’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory as a graduate student in 2011 (Mikhail Jones | nextomoro; LinkedIn).
As a member of Hurst’s lab, Jones served as the lead developer of the control software behind ATRIAS, a bipedal research robot that demonstrated human-like walking dynamics under a spring-mass locomotion model. That control-software lineage carried forward into Cassie, the lab’s first commercialized bipedal platform, and later into Digit, Agility’s full humanoid robot (Terra Magazine; nextomoro).
In 2015, Jones co-founded Agility Robotics alongside Hurst and Damion Shelton as a commercial spinout of the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory, taking on responsibility for the company’s software-engineering organization from the outset. He has held that leadership role continuously since, overseeing Agility’s control- and software-engineering team through the company’s transition from research robots to commercial Digit deployments (DEPLOY; The Silicon Forest).
Source Notes
This profile draws on a nextomoro biographical profile, Jones’s LinkedIn profile, the DEPLOY company registry, The Silicon Forest’s company history, and Oregon State University’s Terra Magazine coverage of the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory.