The Future of Development

Sam Bell chairs the Transportation Advisory Committee in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. As you will hear, that led him to close his highly-regarded auto repair shop in order to devote himself full-time to a small startup venture called RoadPrintz where he and his partner have been working to develop an operator-driven, truck-mounted, mobile robotic pavement marking system. He serves as a member of the City of Cleveland’s Design and Engineering Subcommittee of the Vision Zero Taskforce, and is a Board Member of ATSSA’s [American Traffic Safety Services] Ohio Chapter. He is the Principal Investigator on an ongoing National Science Foundation project in support of his company’s R&D efforts. He is married to his wife of 47 years, and is, he assures us, her ticket to sainthood! Sam, who has frequently been described as a true renaissance man, has a working fluency in Classical Greek and Latin, built his first tube-type computer in the 1950’s, and was named as a Champion of Sustainability in 2010, before it was cool. That same year, he became the only ASE-Automotive Technician ever to earn three consecutive perfect scores on the Advanced Level Certification exam, a feat for which he was named ASE Technician of the Year. As a Contributing Editor, he wrote numerous articles for MOTOR Magazine over a 20-year period, and served as a judge on its Top 20 Tool panel. He’s the author of several very geeky books and has helped with tool development projects for Snap-On, Matco, Hickok Instruments, and others. His dad was a NASA engineer who believed you should never own anything you couldn’t fix yourself. Sam met his partner, Wyatt Newman, PhD, PE, in 2007 when they were both involved in developing an autonomous robotic vehicle as part of the DARPA Urban Challenge. Their vehicle, codenamed DEXTER, was built without a driver’s seat or a steering wheel. DEXTER can be seen at the Crawford Auto/Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. Twitter @RoadPrintz LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/roadprintz/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Roadprintz Website URL www.roadprintz.com