Vaughn Spotlight: Jefferson Maldonado ’16 (ArcBest)

VAUGHN ALUMNUS AND DIRECTOR OF ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION AT ARCBEST WINS MULTIPLE HONORS AND AWARDS FOR INVENTING NEW SOLUTIONS TO VERY OLD LOGISTICS PROBLEMS. “Logistics is a long established industry that hadn’t seen a lot of innovation for a long time,” said Jefferson Maldonado ’16, who was the first robotics engineer hired by global logistics giant ArcBest in Fort Smith, Arkansas. “A pallet of goods going from Florida to California has been shipped the same way for the last hundred years. The same goes for warehousing. And forklifts were invented in 1917 and haven’t changed much. No wonder our supply chain infrastructure became known for bottlenecks during the pandemic. That’s why coming to ArcBest to work in the research and development area has turned out to be a dream job. Logistics is an industry that needs innovation, and I’ve gotten to use all my skills to find ways to disrupt the status quo and do things differently from both the hardware and software perspective.” Disrupting the status quo is exactly what Maldonado has been doing since he chose ArcBest from among six job offers in 2016, the year he graduated from Vaughn with a mechatronic engineering degree after leading the robotics team to win the championship in VEX World’s Robotics Competition. His division, called ArcBest Vaux™, piloted the Vaux Freight Movement System™ in 2019 to solve one of the biggest inefficiencies in the supply chain, namely, slow freight offloading from delivery trucks. “Think of a truck with sixty pallets of materials and each pallet has to be unloaded one at a time at the warehouse, which takes hours and is very inefficient,” explained Maldonado. “Vaux Freight is a hardware solution that lets us unload an entire truck in a few minutes, with no need to touch a single piece of freight.” The system uses a moving platform and rack that sits in the delivery truck and can be wheeled off in seconds, so trucks can get in and out of the loading dock with unprecedented efficiency. Vaux Freight was launched in 2023 and made Time magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year for “Solving the Warehouse Puzzle.” The next clog in the warehouse chain is moving those pallets of materials around with forklifts. “This is not just about productivity, it’s also a safety and a workforce issue,” said Maldonado. “Nowadays, the next generation doesn’t want to drive forklifts and we have an aging workforce and a shortage of labor. And even though forklifts are essential, employee injuries are a problem. When I looked at these problems, a robot was clearly the answer.” In 2024, the robot forklift became a reality with the launch of Vaux Smart Autonomy™, a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with remote teleoperation capability. “Robot forklifts open the labor pool, not only by making the job easier, safer and more appealing, but we’ve opened opportunities for disabled people who would never be able to work in a warehouse but can now operate a forklift,” said Maldonado. Vaux Smart Autonomy was an honoree in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2024, for “helping robots and humans safely work side by side.”  The complete Vaux materials handling solution—Freight, Smart Autonomy and Vaux OS software—was named Robotics Innovation of the Year in the 2024 SupplyTech Breakthrough Awards. Although the system was developed as an internal solution for ArcBest—a multibillion-dollar company with 15,000 employees in 250 locations—Vaux has since been launched publicly to meet demand from other companies who are eager for the efficiencies, safety and workforce advantages made possible with automation. Meanwhile, Maldonado himself was named a “40 Under 40” honoree of 2024 by Arkansas Business, whose editor, Hunter Field, introduced the list of rising stars by writing, “We looked at the accomplishments of these young people in their professions and in their communities; we looked at each nominee’s propensity to lead and do outstanding things. We believe the group recognized today is poised to lead and have a remarkable impact on our state during the next several decades.” In less than a decade since graduating from Vaughn, Maldonado has had quite an impact solving complex supply chain and materials handling challenges, while filing half a dozen patents and building from scratch a 40-person robotics department that includes four other Vaughn alumni. Asked if he intends to stay in logistics, he replied, “I’m making a difference here, solving serious, real-world problems, and I’m having so much fun doing it. Every day, work doesn’t feel like work. People are always talking about not reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, you have to.”

Q&A with Jefferson Maldonado

Q: This is your first job, but you’ve built a 40-person robotics department from the ground up. Do you see a correlation between building ArcBest’s robotics department and building the robotics club during your years at Vaughn? I definitely do. I learned at Vaughn. When I started on the robotics team, there were just two people, and I grew the team to 10 to 15 members, and we took it all the way to winning the VEX championship. It was an amazing training opportunity in the academic setting that I could bring out into the world. It’s no coincidence that when people come here from Vaughn, they notice that things are set up in a similar way to the robotics club, with areas for prototyping and machining, for vehicle integration and electronics, and an area for testing. Q: Forty people, that’s a big staff. What kinds of engineers are on your team? We have a lot of different types of engineers with different skill sets. There are 25 robotics engineers, with master’s degrees and PhDs from around the country, and within that are several specialties: Some are focused on perception and how artificial intelligence (AI) sees the world, some are planning engineers focused on how the robot knows the best route, and then there are robotics control engineers who figure out how to direct the robot to turn and take the best route. It’s like doctors with specialties. Our work takes hardware, software and electrical all mixed together—as in mechatronics. So in addition to the 25 robotics engineers, we have a mechatronics group with nine engineers. Five of them, including myself, are from Vaughn. And we have a group of testing and reliability engineers. Q: With all that you’re doing, why and how do you continue to make time for Vaughn? Several reasons. Vaughn took me to many conferences and competitions, and I didn’t have to pay a dime as a student. And Dr. Rahemi was a mentor and guide and opened my eyes to the industry. So it’s a way of giving back because if it weren’t for Vaughn, I wouldn’t have this job. Also, I want to return what can benefit Vaughn from the knowledge standpoint. The degree gets us started but it just scratches the surface, with the robotics industry changing so much and so fast and with so much information. I want to make sure the students know what the industry is looking for, what they need to polish up on. I might not make a presentation each year, but I do push the Vaughn alumni who work for me to go back to Vaughn, and we’ve done that for the past two years. Q: You’re giving back to Vaughn, and aren’t you also getting some excellent hires? Vaughn is a great recruitment pipeline for us! It’s one of the few colleges with a mechatronic engineering degree that’s ABET-accredited. That’s a huge advantage because it’s hard to get that combination of mechanical, electrical and software from a candidate straight out of college. In fact, I recently promoted Kang Jiang ’22 to manage the whole mechatronics team, which includes Misael Marquez ’22, Daniel Doscher ‘23 and Alex Nando Uquillas ’16. In Silicon Valley, they’d rather get someone from Google or Amazon, but I think I’ve proved that you don’t have to be from a big company or a big school to get things done. Q: When you look at the arc of your life, is there an event you see as life-changing? I discovered my passion for robotics in high school, but otherwise, I wasn’t very interested in academics. So I went into the navy, and that’s where I found my motivation. In fact, in boot camp, I learned that whatever message the world had been giving me about things being a certain way and not being good enough was wrong, and that we could do anything we set our minds to do. That opened my eyes. At Vaughn, I just set my mind to figure out how to win the championship. I set myself to solve a problem. And I keep pushing that. When interns come here, they think they can only do limited things, but they gain confidence and end up doing stuff they never imagined. Article originally published in Vaughn College Magazine Winter 2025.