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MacCallister Higgins

About Mac

MacCallister Higgins (shorthand == Mac) is a full-stack robotics engineer and entrepreneur with a track record of spinning up and delivering new projects with a variety of team sizes. He co-founded a company that deployed self-driving cars across the country, developed physical awareness technology for manned and autonomous military aircraft, and most recently has been architecting the next-generation of drone delivery systems for Amazon at Prime Air.

Amazon Prime Air

At Prime Air, Mac utilized his robotics and software background to develop technical roadmaps and models for the long-term evolution of the Amazon drone delivery system, working across teams and organizations to build consensus around deep and complex technical topics. He developed full-system CONOPs (Concept of Operations) for future iterations, and performed trade studies by building proof-of-concept software implementations of proposed features, creating system models, and deep diving into all aspects of the system across hardware, software, and human organizations.

Voyage

Voyage was acquired by Cruise in March 2021.

As a Co-Founder at Voyage, Mac was responsible for developing both the architecture and direct implementation of localization, perception, mapping, low level controls, and navigation code on the technology and algorithms team. He helped shape the earliest days of the Voyage spin-out, contributing to fundraising, recruiting, team organization, and other high-level company efforts.

As the Director of Growth (Nov 2017-Oct 2019), it was his responsibility to make sure that Voyage vehicles were everywhere customers wanted to use them. As the first person on the ground in new deployments, he evaluated the technical feasibility of the taxi service, coordinated with mapping partners and community stakeholders, handled the logistics behind building remote operations centers and new teams, and handled directed engineering projects specific to the growth story (such as building private wireless networks and infrastructure sensing capabilities).

NVD

Mac founded and began recruiting for NVD in 2014, initially as a senior project at the University of Nevada. After quickly attracting coding talent (@WarGravy, @lavahot, @dquinnfrank), the NVD team set out to create a product that brought drones from the hobbyist world to the everyday consumer. By massively simplifying the process of long-range communication, path planning, localization, and visualization, the NVD platform provided any business that wanted to use drones the ability to do so, while reducing (and eliminating many) technical and regulatory barriers.

Want to hear about NVD from someone else besides me?
  • Check out this TV spot about NVD winning the largest collegiate entrepreneurship competition in the country
  • Here's a great article from the University of Nevada
  • A quick spot on Interdrone, the largest drone conference in the world, where NVD took home the designation of one of top 10 coolest companies by Flystro
  • An AOPA article that features an interview with Mac and NVD

At the time (and to be honest, still to this day), any company that wanted to send a drone across a city ran into many problems, including obstacle avoidance, adherence to local and national laws, long distance monitoring, and expensive pilots. By connecting drones to the internet, NVD provided the technology infrastructure required to integrate existing drone systems into a safe, commercial environment, where drones could be sent anywhere with the click of a button or swipe of a finger, and data could be immediately uploaded and visualized. As a cool note, he's pretty sure that they developed the very first (public) web-based ground control station.

Older Stuff & Education

Mac also helped lead the Udacity self-driving car effort of putting an autonomous car on the road -- which drove with zero disengagements from Mountain View to South San Francisco on surface streets -- using open-source talent from around the world with his unique leadership and engineering background. Before this, he worked on real-time Radar and Lidar sensor systems at SNC, developing next-generation environmental and physical awareness technologies for both fixed wing and rotor aircraft.

He graduated from the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, with multi-disciplinary research roles in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and large-scale control of Unmanned Autonomous Systems for the UNR Robotics group, including failure contingencies and safety systems. He also worked at the Polymer Microsystems (PlUS) Lab under Dr. Geiger, developing lab technologies and assisting in many projects alongside PhD, masters, and undergraduate students. This position had him developing control system circuit board hardware, writing the software for those embedded systems, and implementing radio mesh networks for NASA.

CV and Contact

You've made it this far, so I hope you don't mind that I start talking in first-person now. If you need to contact me, please do so through LinkedIn so that I don't have to lose another email address to the web-scrapers. Alternatively, there's other options if you're clever. My CV is available as a download right here on GitHub, if this page isn't quite up to your professional standards.