About Kuiper
AI that works with the people who run heavy machines.
Kuiper builds a platform that blends the strengths of AI with the expertise of human operators — a new kind of guidance for the machines that build and harvest the physical world, one that keeps people in control while making their work safer and more productive.
Our co-founders
Founded by the researchers behind the work
Ehsan Yousefi
Co-Founder, Co-CEO & CTO
10+ years in shared-autonomy solutions, robotics, and AI.
Inna Sharf
Co-Founder & Co-CEO
30+ years in robotic and autonomous systems.
Born at McGill
A McGill spin-off, grounded in years of world-class research.
Kuiper grew out of shared autonomy and human-in-the-loop research at McGill University. The architecture under our platform is that research — published, peer-reviewed, and now built into a product for the heavy machines already in the field.
We are incubated at McGill Engine, the Faculty of Engineering’s centre for innovation and entrepreneurship, which helps take inventions out of the lab and into the market through funding, coaching, and connections.
Our journey
From the lab to the field
- The lab
Shared autonomy research at McGill
Years of research, supported by NSERC, into how operators and machines share control of field robots and articulated machinery — human-in-the-loop by design.
- 2022
Assisting operators with planning and goal inference
Our first peer-reviewed result at IEEE ICRA: inferring what an operator of articulated machinery is trying to do, and planning optimally to help them do it.
- 2024
A hierarchical shared autonomy framework
A PhD dissertation at McGill brought the work together into one framework for field robot manipulators — the architecture Kuiper builds on.
- 2025
Published in IJRR and IEEE T-RO
Fine-tuning and aligning shared autonomy policies, and adapting and abstracting them for high-level robot operations, in two of the field’s leading journals.
- Kuiper
From research to a product
Kuiper spun off from McGill, incubated at McGill Engine, to turn that research into a platform: a human-supervised autonomy architecture, light-weight foundation models, and solutions built on them.
- 2026
Piloting
The Navigation Co-Planner went into the forest on a working machine, with our forestry partners.
Our papers
The research underneath
The peer-reviewed work our shared autonomy architecture is built on.
- Shared autonomy policy fine-tuning and alignment for robotic tasks2025
- Baseline Policy Adapting and Abstraction of Shared Autonomy for High-Level Robot Operations2025
- Hierarchical Shared Autonomy Framework for Field Robot Manipulators2024
- Assisting Operators of Articulated Machinery with Optimal Planning and Goal Inference2022