Dr. Ron Diftler

Dr. Ron Diftler serves as the Robonaut Project Leader at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Robonaut is a human-scale space robotic system designed to assist astronauts before, during, and after space walks. The Robonaut Team’s latest robot, Robonaut 2 (R2), is the culmination of 15 years of NASA Robonaut development and a highly successful partnership with General Motors (GM). In addition to collaboration with GM, Dr. Diftler led his team through previous collaborations with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Southern California, Rice University, and the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition.