Davis Catherman
Ph.D. Researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Marlborough, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavis Catherman is a robotics-focused Ph.D. researcher and engineer with 11 years of experience building hardware-software systems for autonomous vehicles, UAVs, and space robotics. He combines academic rigor—coauthoring IEEE publications and pursuing advanced degrees at WPI—with hands-on impact at NASA, Waymo, Canon, and startups, where he saved hardware costs by shifting testing to SITL and redesigned CI/CD and embedded deployment pipelines. Davis has led ground-up platform redesigns and introduced containerized AI training pipelines that detected methane plumes in windy conditions, and he implemented plugin-based online graph sampling to improve narrow-passage planning at Waymo. Currently he develops multi-robot autonomy and swarm “theory of mind” reasoning for lunar surface operations using large-scale HPC simulations. Known for formalizing designs with UML and pragmatic use of simulation to avoid costly field tests, he excels at translating research into production-ready systems across C++, Python, ROS, and embedded Linux. Always eager to collaborate, he blends inventor curiosity with systems-level engineering to tackle constrained-communication and safety-critical autonomy challenges.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic InstituteBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering at Christopher Newport University
Stackoverflow
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0reached
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Github Skills (60)
singularity-container10
apptainer10
singularity9
amazon9
logitech9
rgb8
exec8
science8
devcontainer8
linux8
remote-development8
lambda7
debug7
vscode7
hpc7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
CnuUasLab/IMG
Feb 2017 - May 2017
Contributions:32 commits, 45 pushes, 10 branches in 3 months
manipulationimageimage-manipulationimage-processinggenie
dcat52/apptainer-definitions
Sep 2021 - Sep 2024
Singularity definition files for containers
Contributions:1 PR, 37 pushes, 3 branches in 3 years 1 month
containersseccompsingularitypodmandocker
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