Brian P. Gerkey

Dr. Brian Gerkey is Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage. Before joining Willow Garage, Dr. Gerkey was a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI, and before that, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. Dr. Gerkey received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003, his M.S. in Computer Science from USC in 2000, and his B.S.E. in Computer Engineering, with a secondary major in Mathematics and a minor in Robotics & Automation, from Tulane University in 1998.

Dr. Gerkey is founding and co-lead developer on the open source Player Project, which produces one of the most widely used software platforms for robotics research and education. He is a strong believer in, frequent contributor to, and constant beneficiary of open source software.

Dr. Gerkey's current research focuses on the planning and control problems that arise in mobile manipulation systems. He also works extensively on the (often under-appreciated) software engineering and integration problems that abound in building complex robot software systems. In a previous life, Dr. Gerkey worked on multi-robot coordination; for now he's trying to make the individual robots more capable, after which he may return to the multi-robot world.

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