James Kuffner joined Joby Aviation’s board of directors in 2021. He is the CEO and Representative Director of Woven Planet Holdings, and a Member of the Board of Directors and Operating Officer of Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota). James is
best known as a co-inventor of the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm, which has become a key standard benchmark for robot motion planning. As a Research Scientist and Engineering Director at Google, he was part of the initial engineering team that built Google’s self-driving cars. In 2010, James introduced the term “Cloud Robotics” to describe how network-connected robots could take advantage of distributed computation and data stored in the cloud.