Nathan Brooks
CTO at PickNik Robotics
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Brooks is a robotics-focused technology leader and CTO with 14 years of experience building and scaling robot software, research programs, and products from academia to commercial consultancy. Based in Boulder, he has shepherded PickNik Robotics from applied research roles to executive leadership, blending deep technical contributions—such as significant work on the widely used MoveIt2 ROS2 motion-planning stack—with team and product leadership. His background includes a PhD-focused trajectory at Carnegie Mellon in multi-robot teams and human-robot interaction, which informs his emphasis on operator workflows and mixed-initiative control systems. Nathan combines hands-on systems engineering (kinematics plugins, sensor QoS, servo singularity handling) with strategic delivery for clients, making open-source robotics tooling a core asset of his company. Colleagues rely on him for translating cutting-edge research into robust, deployable solutions for complex automation problems.
14 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Robotics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Robotics at Carnegie Mellon UniversityB.S. Computer Science Electrical Engineering, B.S. Computer Science Electrical Engineering at The University of Tulsa
Github Skills (8)
moveit10
robotics10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
kinematics10
ros10
algorithms8
algorithm8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
moveit/moveit2
Jun 2020 - Dec 2022
:robot: MoveIt for ROS 2
Role in this project:
Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:45 reviews, 9 commits, 19 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nathan primarily contributed to the `moveit2` ROS 2 project by porting existing functionality and implementing new features. Their work involved modifying kinematics plugins, and addressing constraint handling issues. They also added a feature related to publishing singularity conditions for the servo server and improving its behavior. Additionally, the user updated the project to use sensor data QOS profiles for sensor messages.
roboticsros2robotros-2ros
nbbrooks/sami-core
Jan 2015 - Mar 2022
Core components of the SAMI human-robot team planning language based off of Colored Petri Nets. Deployment video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Qhp1JSoNI
Contributions:2 PRs, 57 pushes, 2 branches in 7 years 4 months
roboticsdeploymentnetssamicolored
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