Ben Charrow
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Waymo
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Charrow is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and roboticist with 15 years of experience specializing in state estimation, mapping, and motion planning, currently co-technical lead on a 100-person Waymo project driving core planner technology. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania focused on active information gathering for mobile robots and earlier degrees from MIT, combining rigorous research with production-grade systems work. At Waymo he progressed rapidly through promotions and balances hands-on engineering with organizational leadership, previously serving as IC and tech lead manager. An active open-source contributor to the ROS ecosystem, he has improved rviz’s UI/plugin architecture and extended rosbag with LZ4 compression support, reflecting deep expertise in robot tooling and data pipelines. Based in Mountain View, he blends algorithmic rigor with pragmatic engineering to move autonomous systems from research prototypes into robust, deployable software.
15 years of coding experience
Master's Degree Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Master's Degree Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (13)
lz410
plugin-development10
user-interface10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
ui-design10
qt10
python10
ros10
compress10
architecture9
architectures9
command-line-tool9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
ros-visualization/rviz
Jul 2013 - Aug 2014
ROS 3D Robot Visualizer
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:25 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the development of the rviz application, focusing on enhancements to the user interface and plugin architecture. Their work includes creating a new dialog for adding display types, refactoring the display creation process with a tabbed interface for selection by display type or topic, and implementing utility functions to group similar topics. Additionally, the user made significant changes to allow plugins to visualize multiple topic types and introduced a method to filter topics by name.
3dros
ros/ros_comm
Jun 2013 - May 2014
ROS communications-related packages, including core client libraries (roscpp, rospy, roslisp) and graph introspection tools (rostopic, rosnode, rosservice, rosparam).
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 comment in 11 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on improving the `rosbag` tool, a core component of the ROS (Robot Operating System) ecosystem. Their contributions involved fixing bugs related to print function calls and missing newlines in error messages, enhancing the usability of the tool. The user also implemented LZ4 compression support for rosbag, adding both C++ and Python libraries and integrating it into the command-line tools, expanding the data storage options. These changes demonstrate a deep understanding of the ROS framework and its data storage mechanisms.
graphrosros-noderospyrobotics
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