An Interview with Gerry Roston
Gerry Roston, CEO of Savionics and Executive in Residence at TechTown Detroit, discusses his career from JPL robotics to industrial IoT. He details building the 'Robbie' prototype for the Mars Sojourner rover, using PDP-11 and VAX computers, and later autonomous vehicles at CMU. At Savionics, he explains deploying wireless sensor nodes to monitor stamping machines, avoiding PLC integration to mitigate security risks, and using customer discovery to pivot from energy monitoring to predictive maintenance.