Dave Coleman
Chief Product Officer & Founder at Chef Robotics
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Coleman is a robotics product leader and founder with 15 years of experience translating state-of-the-art motion planning research into commercial products, currently steering the MoveIt Pro Robotics Platform from Boulder, Colorado. He combines deep hands-on expertise in ROS, MoveIt, Gazebo, OMPL and ros_control with executive experience leading a 50-person team to deploy robot arms across diverse real-world applications. His open-source footprint includes impactful contributions to flagship projects like MoveIt, ROS 2 documentation, Gazebo integration and OMPL, improving simulation fidelity, controllers, and tutorials that millions of robotics developers rely on. As a longtime contributor and technical writer he bridges developer ergonomics and backend robustness—often fixing deprecated APIs, adding visualization and trajectory controls, and hardening controller code. Dave’s background spans academia and industry—from humanoid planning at the University of Tokyo to internships at Google and Willow Garage—giving him a rare blend of research, product and systems integration skills. He also quietly shapes developer experience (docs, tutorials and tooling) that accelerates adoption of robotic software across teams and labs.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors Mechanical Engineering Minor Computer Science, Bachelors Mechanical Engineering Minor Computer Science at Georgia Institute of TechnologyPhD Masters Computer Science, PhD Masters Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
95reputation
2kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (38)
simulation10
c-language10
visualization10
robotics10
integrate10
restructuredtext10
gazebosim10
sphinx10
technical-writing10
plugin-development10
simulations10
enterprise-integration10
rs10
application-integration10
user-interface10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ros-simulation/gazebo_ros_demos
Jun 2013 - Jun 2019
Example robots and code for interfacing Gazebo with ROS
Role in this project:
Robotics/ROS Developer
Robotics/ROS DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 27 commits, 12 PRs in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Dave made several modifications to the `gazebo_ros_demos` repository, including improvements to robot simulation, specifically the rrbot example. They integrated ros_control for joint control, a key aspect of robotics simulation, and added example code for custom plugin development. Furthermore, the user introduced sensor plugins and modified launch files to run controllers for the example robot. These actions demonstrate a focus on enhancing the Gazebo simulation environment for ROS-based robots.
gazeboignitionroboticsrobotics-simulationros2
moveit/moveit_tutorials
Aug 2016 - May 2021
A sphinx-based centralized documentation repo for MoveIt
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:40 reviews, 101 commits, 198 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the documentation of the MoveIt! tutorials project. Their commits focused on improving the structure, content, and clarity of the tutorials, including adding new sections, clarifying instructions, correcting typos, and fixing broken links. They also implemented enhancements such as adding feedback boxes and clarifying the use of the Panda robot. Their work significantly improved the usability and accessibility of the tutorial content.
centralizedpythonmoveitsphinx
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