Andrew Best
Staff Research Scientist Motion Simulator Project Lead, Platform Research
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Best is a Staff Research Scientist and Motion Simulator Project Lead at Toyota Research Institute with seven years of engineering and research experience building simulation platforms for autonomous driving, human-robot interaction, and vehicle testing. He blends hands-on software and hardware architecture—authoring drivers, simulation software, and test frameworks—with program-level technical direction and mentorship across academia and industry. His PhD-backed background in multi-agent and crowd simulation informs rigorous model-based design choices, and he has contributed to high-profile open-source robotics tooling by extending Drake’s maliput traffic-rule modeling. Comfortable leading cross-disciplinary teams, he scopes complex projects from requirements through delivery and closes capability gaps between research needs and simulator systems. Known for seeking new challenges and putting in the work to ship robust research platforms, he also brings a practical systems mindset from earlier lead-engineering and operations roles.
7 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillBachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at University of Louisiana at LafayetteMaster of Science (M.S.), Computer Science, Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
French
Github Skills (7)
c-language10
robotics10
cprogramming-language10
api-design10
yaml9
computer-engineering9
testing8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Mar 2019 - May 2019
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 8 PRs, 3 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the `drake` repository by implementing new classes and functionalities related to `DirectionUsageRule` within the `maliput` submodule, which focuses on modeling and verification for robotics. Their work included defining the `DirectionUsageRule` class, its associated `State` class, and related test utilities. The user also integrated the `DirectionUsageRule` into the `RoadRulebook` and added YAML support for the class. These changes add key functionality for defining traffic rules in a road network model.
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsdrakeverification
andrewbest-tri/ros-bridge
Nov 2021 - Sep 2024
Contributions:14 PRs, 5 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 11 months
gazeboroboticsros2bridgesimulation
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