Matthew Powelson
Senior Robotics Software Engineer at ARM Institute
Greater Pittsburgh Region United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Powelson is a Senior Robotics Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building production robotic systems that bridge perception, planning, and hardware. He helped scale Tortuga AgTech’s fruit-picking platform from prototype to a fleet of 150+ robots, contributing across arm planning, ML model training, hardware integration and even battery engineering. An active ROS-Industrial contributor, he’s added camera simulation and pick-and-place planning refinements to widely used training material, reflecting a practical focus on simulation-to-hardware transfer. Based in the Greater Pittsburgh region, he brings a hands-on mix of research pedigree (NASA, Vanderbilt) and startup grit, comfortable moving between C++ backend work, system integration, and field deployments.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, Mechanical Engineering, Master’s Degree, Mechanical Engineering at Tennessee Technological University
English
Github Skills (6)
pathfinding10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
ros10
simulations9
simulation9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ros-industrial/industrial_training
Aug 2018 - Mar 2019
ROS-Industrial Training Material
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:118 commits, 2 PRs, 3 comments in 6 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the `sensor_simulator_3d.cpp` file, adding features to launch and combine simulated cameras within the `ros-industrial/industrial_training` repository. The user also made changes to the `trajopt_pick_and_place_constructor.cpp` and other files to add tutorial gh pages and make hardware integration changes, which included implementing collision and velocity costs. The user's work appears focused on refining the pick and place planning and simulation aspects within the training material.
rosros-industrial
mpowelson/tesseract
Aug 2018 - Feb 2025
Light Weight Environment for ROS
Contributions:2 reviews, 10 PRs, 523 pushes in 6 years 6 months
roboticslight-weightros2lightros
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