CEO & CO-FOUNDER
Connor Crawford
Connor D. Crawford, MSE, has a track record of innovation, leadership, and attainment of business results in mechatronics design & manufacturing for both the aerospace and energy industries. He has over 8 years of technical, operations, and strategic leadership experience related to bringing concepts from the drawing board to realization. His work at Lockheed Martin helped the company deliver on foreign and domestic aircraft & spacecraft contracts. His work as a graduate student and entrepreneur has taken robotic technology from scholarship to practice, enabling a novel path forward for petrochemical storage tank inspections which eliminates the need to send humans into dangerous, confined spaces.
As an R&D and Design engineer, Connor Crawford played a critical role on various teams at Lockheed Martin, supporting the F-16, Dream Chaser Spaceplane (for missions to the International Space Station), & various SkunkWorks programs. He accomplished original equipment and structural design to incorporate modernization kit and hardware to support various avionics upgrade programs of multiple countries’ F-16 fleets. He designed parts for preliminary stress and manufacturing cost evaluation as part of the structural design team on a classified aircraft program. He has hands-on experience in large bonded, integrated composite structure as part of the Dream Chaser structural development team. At the time this ship was the largest unitized, graphite co-bonded vehicle in history.
In 2017 Connor was invited to participate in the Vega Program, a Lockheed Martin Internal Research & Development initiative. For three years he led a team that developed additive-manufactured tooling, which was crucial for the company’s innovative co-bonded assembly process. He supported development of an Autonomous Inspection Drone that could identify corrosion and other issues with low observable coatings on the F-35 program. During his last role at Lockheed, he developed a Python package, which automated design efforts on airframe, hydraulic systems, and electrical lines.
In 2019, Connor transitioned into the world of robotics, of robotics, returning to UT Austin to continue his studies, while also working as a graduate research assistant (GRA) for the Nuclear and Applied Robotics Lab (NRG). He served as the project lead for an industry-funded research project, whose mission was to develop and deploy a wall-climbing robot for inspection of above-ground storage tanks, specifically floating roof seals. Leading a team of 15+ research assistants (over the course of the project), Connor and his team built, programmed, and tested a university prototype that performs visual, physical, & LiDAR-based mechanical integrity assessments of methane-reducing tank seals. This prototype utilized a motion controller which could correct for off-axis effects of friction experienced during the mission. Additionally, the safety sub-systems developed (through this effort) are critical capabilities that will make this robot the first high-powered system able to be used in potentially flammable environments.
Connor and the company’s co-founder, Dr. Mitch Pryor, formed Pike Robotics in 2021 with a mission of providing advanced inspection tools for the Energy Industry during its transition to a de-carbonized, greener future. The company’s beachhead market is inspection of floating roof storage tanks using the robot developed during Connor’s graduate research project. His priorities right now are performing validation tests and demos of the technology at real-world storage tank farms and refineries, as well as fundraising to provide the team adequate runway needed to certify the robot. Connor is the recipient of the Sustainability Innovation & Texas Rising Star awards at the Spring '22 Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs competition. Connor is one of the technical authors on PCT/US2020/020420, a utility patent for integrated system design for tank seal inspections. He received his MSc. from The University of Texas at Austin and BSc. from Texas Tech University, both degrees in mechanical engineering.