Robotics Industry Veteran Vivek Burhanpurkar to Lead Great Rock as President and CEO

TORONTO, September 29, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

Great Rock Development Corp. (OTC: GROC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Vivek Burhanpurkar. as President, C.E.O. and Director.

Mr. Burhanpurkar attended the University of Toronto Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 1980 to 1984 (at the time, ranked #4 in North America after MIT, Stanford and Princeton) and wrote the world's first thesis paper on autonomous navigation for floor cleaning under department Chairman K.C. Smith (at the time, one of the world's most famous engineering professors -whose textbook is still the most widely used in the world: Sedra and Smith, Circuits and Systems). That paper was the catalyst for Mr. Burhanpurkar founding Cyberworks with the encouragement of his professor. The company was the first in the world to develop a fully autonomous floor cleaning robot and now constitutes the world's oldest autonomous mobile robotics company.

Mr. Burhanpurkar has served on numerous international scientific committees, including:

• Session Co-Chair, Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles Conference (US Dept of Defense conference c. 1993)
• Member, Organization Committee, Scientific Peer Reviewer, IEEE International Intelligent Robotics Symposium, 1994, Munich Germany
• Session Chairperson, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Fifth World Conference on Robotics Research, Cambridge Mass, USA, 1994
• Keynote Speaker, American Association of Artificial Intelligence Symposium, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 1993
• Session Co-Chair, Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles Conference (US Dept of Defense conference c. 1993)

Commenting on the appointment, "This is huge" stated Mr. John S. Wilkes, a Director of Great Rock Development. "I first met Vivek a number of years ago, shortly after his company, Cyberworks Robotics Inc., had made an ethical exit from manufacturing robots for industry. He was the first to say, "yeah, we are ahead of our time with our technology, but we still need to develop better robotic vision to allow for the wide-spread deployment of fully-autonomous equipment in society. When the market learns of what Vivek and his team has quietly accomplished over the past few years, it will tremble" added Mr. Wilkes". I defy anybody to find a better qualified individual to be running a company on the leading edge of autonomous robotic, vision-based, navigation systems" concluded Mr. Wilkes.

A partial list of Mr. Burhanpurkar's early peer-reviewed scientific publications in major journals follows:

• Burhanpurkar, V. 1993. "Design of commercial autonomous service robots", In Proceedings of AAAI 1993 Fall Symposium Series: Instantiating Real-World Agents, Raleigh, NC, pp. 26-33.
• Vivek P. Burhanpurkar, Colin Hinz, Ravi Lingarkar, Naresh K. Sinha, "Control Architecture of An Autonomous Surveillance Robot for Unstructured Environments", Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Robotics and Manufacturing: Research, Education and Applications (ISRAM '90), Burnaby BC, Canada,  July 18-20, 1990, Vol. 3, pp. 881-886
• V.P. Burhanpurkar, "Development of an Autonomous Surveillance Mobile Robot for Unstructured Environments", Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Military Robotics Applications, Kingston Ontario, Canada, August 8-11 1989, pp. 76-80
• V. Burhanpurkar, "New Approaches Enhance Path Guidance Technology", Robotics World, Issue February 1990
• V.P. Burhanpurkar, "Real World Application of a Low-Cost High Performance Sensor System for Autonomous Mobile Robots", Proceedings Intelligent Robots and Systems 1994, Advanced Robotic Systems and the Real World, IROS '94
• Lang, S.; Roth, G.; Green, D.A.; Burhanpurkar, V. "Visual Measurement of Orientation Using Ceiling Features", Proceedings of the IEEE Instrumentation Measurement Technology Conference, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan, May 10-12, 1994., Date: 1994, Pages: 552-555

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Contact:
Great Rock Development Corp.
http://www.GreatRockDev.com
[email protected]
+1-416-568-9051

SOURCE Great Rock Development Corp.