Mark Petersen
Staff Software Engineer at Boston Dynamics
Woburn, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Petersen is a robotics-focused software and controls engineer with eight years of experience blending academic research and industry product work, currently at Boston Dynamics and as a PhD student at Harvard/MIT-affiliated CSAIL. He specializes in motion planning, trajectory optimization, and learned visual feedback for manipulators and legged systems, with practical experience deploying controllers on hardware like Cassie and hardening planning pipelines at startups such as Dexai. An active open-source contributor to the prominent RobotLocomotion/drake project, his backend commits improved multibody rigid-body representations and constraint bindings that enhance model-based design and verification for robotics. Known for reducing failure modes from dynamic-limit violations and for digging into algorithmic shortfalls on deformable-object manipulation, he pairs rigorous convex-optimization research with hands-on systems engineering. Based in Woburn, MA, he brings a rare mix of theory-to-hardware delivery and a habit of keeping most research publicly available on GitHub.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
New Trier High SchoolDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering at Harvard UniversityBachelor of Science & Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Bachelor of Science & Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University
Github Skills (4)
cprogramming-language10
robotics10
c-language10
dynamics9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Jun 2018 - Dec 2022
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:173 reviews, 117 commits, 114 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Mark's commits focus on enhancing the `multibody/rigid_body_tree` module within the Drake robotics library. They added features related to relative distance constraints, including the ability to add these constraints between points in the `RigidBodyTree`. Furthermore, the commits include the addition of bindings for `ChildOfJoint` and `QDotToV` methods, demonstrating involvement in improving the library's functionality and usability. Code changes are targeted towards improving the functionalities for model-based design and verification for robotics.
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsdrakeverification
mpetersen94/gcs
Feb 2022 - Oct 2022
Contributions:1 release, 1 review, 55 commits in 7 months
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