Michael Posa
Associate Professor
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Posa is an associate professor and roboticist who directs the Dynamic Autonomy and Intelligent Robotics (DAIR) Lab within Penn’s GRASP Lab, specializing in planning, control, and formal analysis for robots that physically interact with complex environments. With 11 years of experience bridging academia and industry—from robotics engineering at Vecna to a PhD at MIT—he focuses on computationally tractable algorithms that enable dynamic, safe manipulation and locomotion. He combines theoretical rigor with practical software contributions, including back-end development and test automation for the widely used RobotLocomotion/drake library, adding Python bindings and dynamics features like spring forces. Based in Philadelphia, he brings deep multidisciplinary training (Stanford BS/MS, MIT PhD) and a knack for turning formal guarantees into implementable systems for real-world robotic tasks.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaster of Science - MS, Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University
Github Skills (7)
robotics10
python10
drake10
testing10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Jun 2018 - Mar 2022
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 16 commits, 24 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the Drake robotics library by adding Python bindings and implementing a new `drawKinematicTree` function for the `RigidBodyTree` class. They also modified existing test files, adding checks for the new functionality and ensuring the code's robustness. Furthermore, they added spring forces to `DrakeJoint` and implemented it within `RigidBodyTree`, alongside tests to ensure its function.
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsdrakeverification
mposa/DIRCON
Mar 2018 - May 2018
Contributions:58 commits, 18 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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