Richard Poyner
Senior Manager, Dynamics And Simulation, Robotics
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Poyner is a senior robotics software leader with over a decade of experience designing dynamics and simulation systems, now leading the Dynamics and Simulation team at Toyota Research Institute in Cambridge, MA. He blends deep hands-on engineering—contributing tests, documentation, and core-system edits to the widely used open-source Drake toolkit—with team leadership that moves research-grade simulators toward robust, production-ready robotics workflows. His career spans embedded and systems software through to advanced robotic simulation, with long tenures at research and industry labs that reflect both technical depth and program-level delivery. Known for improving clarity and reliability in complex codebases, he pairs a MIT computer science foundation with a pragmatic focus on verifiable, model-based design.
10 years of coding experience
33 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (9)
doxygen10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
documentation10
testing9
dynamics8
geometry7
urdf7
sdformat7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
RobotLocomotion/drake
Mar 2016 - Jan 2023
Model-based design and verification for robotics.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 5050 reviews, 307 commits in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on improving the internal documentation within the Drake library. They updated the doxygen block diagrams for better clarity and consistency, adding and updating various systems within the code. Their contributions involved the creation of tests for verifying the implementations and error handling within the system, also updating documentation to enhance clarity. The commits involved edits to several core components, like systems, multibody, geometry and tests, showing significant involvement with the codebase.
model-basedmodel-based-designroboticsdrakeverification
rpoyner-tri/drake
Mar 2016 - Apr 2025
A planning, control, and analysis toolbox for nonlinear dynamical systems. More info at
Contributions:11 reviews, 7 PRs, 3212 pushes in 9 years 2 months
crosswordentropystructural-engineeringnonlinearnonlinear-dynamics
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