Dirk Thomas is the maintainer of the ROS core packages including the build system catkin, message generation, the communication layer as well as the C++ and Python client libraries. Before he joined OSRF, Dirk was at Willow Garage focused on the development of catkin and the graphical user interface framework rqt as well as enhancing the ROS infrastructure. He will apply his experience with robotics middleware and software design and engineering skills to improve the state of the art of open source robotics.

Dirk received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany in 2010. His research has been focused on robotic middleware design and efficient communication. During his studies he has been an active member of the RoboCup community and participated in numerous competitions been 2003 and 2010 in the Standard Platform League as well as the Humanoid KidSize League.

William is a Software Engineer and a robotics enthusiast. He joined the Open Source Robotics Foundation as a member of the ROS development team in February of 2013. Before that he worked at Willow Garage on general ROS development and supporting internal Willow Garage projects. He will apply his software engineering and design skills to improve the state of open source robotics at OSRF.

William has his Master’s in Software Engineering from Auburn University under the direction of Dr. David Bevly and has been active in several collegiate robotics teams and competitions while at Auburn including autonomous lawnmowers, autonomous recycling robots, the NASA lunar excavator competition, and autonomous outdoor unexploded ordinance detection robots. William also has a passion for open source software having released a BSD licensed segwayrmp library written in C++, a BSD licensed serial library written in C++ and other contributions to the ROS community. William is from Alabama, but he is enjoying the nice California climate.

Roberta Friedman is the Chief Financial Officer at OSRF. Prior to joining OSRF, Roberta was the Controller at Willow Garage, as well as consulting with small to medium size companies in the areas of accounting, tax, payroll and operations. Roberta has a BS in Accounting and an MBA in Tax and Finance. She has worked in Public Accounting, Government Auditing and the private sector. Her experience includes 15+ years with SONY Corp. of America in Operations and Administration, both in Divisional and Corporate roles, including being part of the Management Team that built the original DirecTv plant in Castle Rock, CO. She has also spent the better part of the last 8 years as a Board Member for several educational programs.

Tully Foote is the ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation. His work at the Open Source Robotics Foundation is a continuation of his work at Willow Garage where he focused on ROS development, building core tools and libraries to support the ROS community. Prior to Willow Garage he worked on all three DARPA Grand Challenges, twice on the Caltech team and in the Urban Challenge on the University of Pennsylvania team. He is also the co-creator of the TurtleBot, a platform designed to expand the availability of robotics to new communities.

Ian received his BE and PhD in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Auckland in 2007 and 2011 respectively. His PhD research focused on applying mixed reality techniques to enhance robot simulations, creating a world where robots are capable of sensing and physically interacting with virtual objects. He also developed augmented reality systems for real time visualization of robot sensory and task-relevant information.

Prior to joining OSRF, he was a software engineer at Nokia where he contributed to the open source Qt framework. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Auckland during which he worked on visualization, 3D perception, and human-robot interaction projects. His key research interests are in mixed reality, augmented reality tracking, and robot simulation.

Hugo received a mechanical engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal. He has over 15 years of professional development experience. At Makerbot Industries, he created Miracle-Grue, Makerbot’s first tool path engine for 3D printers. At McGill University, he worked on parallel GPU algorithms for the computational chemistry lab. Hugo is also an architect of SIMSAT (versions 2.x on Windows and 3.x on Linux), the real time spacecraft simulator of the European Space Agency.

Carlos Agüero is a Research Engineer at Open Source Robotics Foundation. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Computer Science, under the supervision of Dr. José M. Cañas and Dr. Vicente Matellán. Carlos’s research has been focused on multi-robot object localization, task allocation and multi-target object localization. He has been active member of the RoboCup community since 2005 and is a co-founder of Spiteam, the RoboCup Standard Platform League team. He co-developed a complete robot architecture (Behaviour-based Iterative Control Architecture, BICA) from scratch for the Nao robot applied to robot soccer and Alzheimer therapy.

Before joining OSRF, Carlos held a faculty position in the GSyC Department at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and was Director of the Telematics and Computer Systems Master program. In 2010 and 2011, he visited the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and CORAL Research group at Carnegie Mellon University.