Daniel Melanz
Research Robotics Engineer at Energid Technologies
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Melanz is a Research Robotics Engineer with 13 years of experience building high-performance simulation and control software for aerospace, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, defense, and medical robotics. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and developed a GPU-native multibody dynamics engine capable of simulating millions of rigid and flexible bodies using advanced nonlinear optimization. At Energid he applies that simulation and control expertise to commercial robot systems (Actin®) while earlier roles at TARDEC and JPL focused on terramechanics, uncertainty quantification, and mobility in challenging environments. His profile blends deep academic research with hands-on engineering—designing test suites, validating models against experiments, and optimizing systems for real-world deployment. Based in Madison, WI, he is particularly skilled at scaling physics-based methods to exploit modern GPU hardware, a capability that differentiates his work from typical robotics software engineers.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Github Skills (6)
simulation10
physics-engine10
robotics10
cpp10
multiphysics10
modeling10
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
projectchrono/chrono-flex
Sep 2013 - Mar 2015
Contributions:61 commits, 21 pushes in 1 year 5 months
melanz/DVIDE
Jan 2015 - Jan 2017
Contributions:197 commits in 2 years
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