Ashton Larkin
Research Assistant at University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAshton Larkin is a software engineer and robotics researcher with seven years of experience building robust autonomous systems, currently a Research Assistant at the University of Utah and pursuing robotics research at the PhD level. He combines systems-level software engineering with hands-on robotics expertise in planning, SLAM, state estimation, simulation, behavior trees, and manipulation. A steady open-source contributor, Ashton has improved performance and multithreading safety in the widely used gz-sim robotics simulator by introducing statically-typed views and backend refactors. He favors scalable, maintainable designs—refactoring for unordered maps and locked views—to make simulation infrastructure safer and faster in realistic workloads. Based in Salt Lake City, he brings academic rigor from BYU and a practical focus on production-quality code for complex robotic stacks.
7 years of coding experience
Computer Science, Computer Science at Brigham Young University
Github Skills (9)
simulations10
simulation10
c-language10
cpp10
gazebosim10
cprogramming-language10
performance-optimization10
multithreading10
robotics9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
gazebosim/gz-sim
Aug 2021 - Jun 2022
Open source robotics simulator. The latest version of Gazebo.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:317 reviews, 22 commits, 101 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ashton's commits primarily involve modifications to the `gz-sim` repository, focusing on improving performance and code structure. They implemented statically-typed views to optimize performance. Their work included locking views during system PostUpdates, improving multi-threading safety, and refactoring to use `std::unordered_map` where possible. These changes demonstrate a focus on backend optimization within the simulation environment.
roboticsignition-gazeboignition-roboticsgraphical-interfaceignition-libraries
adlarkin/mjpl
May 2025 - Aug 2025
MuJoCo motion planning library.
Contributions:1 release, 6 reviews, 22 PRs in 3 months
motion-planningmujocopythonrobotics
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