Research

As a member of the RT-Synthesis Research Group, the major focus of my research is software and developer tools for robot developers. I am currently involved in several projects working to develop and enhance the tools we use to create robotic and intelligent systems. One of these is OpenRTM-aist, a major effort to develop a software framework for intelligent systems. As example applications, I tend to use mobile robots, which follows my other research interests in useful mobile robots capable of operating in unstructured and unusual environments.

I have significant contributions to open-source software for robotics. I am a developer for the Player Project, an open-source robotics toolkit. Player is very widely used and provides support for a very large number of devices, from range scanners and cameras to navigation algorithms and entire robots. It is one of the most widely-used robotics software tools.

I am one of the founders of the GearBox Project, which provides peer-reviewed, open-source libraries of common robot functionality. It provides increased reusability by separating functional software from integration software. These libraries include hardware drivers and algorithm implementations. While still a fledgling project, GearBox libraries are already in use in three software architectures (Player, OpenRTM-aist and ORCA2) as well as in independent applications.

I have many other open-source projects, mostly related to robotics. Most of them can be found at my github page. They include developer tools for robotics, as well as general tools such as a Python version of the popular pkg-config tool, which runs on Windows.

My background is in Computer Systems Engineering, which specialises in embedded computer systems and the larger electrical and mechanical systems around them, including low-level computer design, right down to designing microprocessors, and software for embedded systems. I undertook my PhD in Electrical Engineering at the Robotics Research Group. My PhD research took an evaluative, developer-oriented approach to developing new tools for robot programmers.