ProtoInnovations

ProtoInnovations, LLC is a privately held robotics research and development company founded on February 3, 2005 by Dimitrios (Dimi) Apostolopoulos, a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Headquartered at 100 43rd Street in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood, the firm operates as a CMU spin-off specializing in modular software architectures and autonomous systems for extreme environments including the Moon, Mars, and deep off-world settings.

The company's flagship software product is M-SAFE (Modular Software Architecture and Algorithms for Fast and Efficient Lunar Mobility), an onboard autonomy stack for high-speed lunar rover mobility that manages real-time supervisory and coordinated mobility control with tight computational and power budgets. RBNPM (Rover-Based Non-Prehensile Manipulation) is a complementary control architecture enabling autonomous rover excavation, transport, and regolith deposition in support of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU); NASA awarded a Phase II SBIR contract of $5.4 million for this work in 2022. PILAR (ProtoInnovations Lunar Autonomous Rover) is the company's medium-to-large-class rover platform engineered for demanding off-world surface operations.

ProtoInnovations has received 15 NASA Phase I and 10 NASA Phase II SBIR awards totaling more than $16.5 million. A Phase III contract (80NSSC25C0492, FY2025) for a K-REX2 Rover ROS2 control interface confirms active integration of open-source robotics middleware for NASA flight hardware. NASA's Tipping Point Program awarded the company $6.2 million to productize its autonomous rover mobility software so it can be applied across arbitrary rover platforms.

Notable project work includes autonomous mobility software for NASA's VIPER lunar rover, which was designed to prospect for water ice at the lunar south pole. The company employs 5-9 specialists and maintains relationships with Carnegie Mellon University, Astrobotic Technology, and several prominent robotics researchers including Karl Iagnemma and Siddhartha Srinivasa in advisory roles.