Robin Deits is a robotics engineer with 14 years of experience designing motion planning, optimization, and control systems for legged and aerial robots, currently developing Atlas behaviors at Boston Dynamics. His background spans DARPA challenge footstep planners, aggressive quadrotor flight planning, NLP for robotic forklifts, and bioinspired burrowing hardware, showing a rare blend of theory and hands-on experimentation. He contributed to foundational open-source robotics and numerical projects—improving Drake controllers and enhancing performance and test coverage in Julia libraries like Interpolations.jl and StaticArrays.jl. Trained at MIT (SB, Physics) and a former PhD student working on locomotion and flight, he brings strong low-level C++ and algorithmic chops as well as practical systems engineering. Colleagues rely on him to turn complex optimization ideas into robust, real-world robot behaviors. An eclectic contributor, he pairs academic publications with production-grade code and testing practices.
14 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
SB, Physics, SB, Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Contributions:1450 commits, 192 PRs, 10 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Robin appears to be involved in low-level robotics and back-end tasks within the Drake project, focusing on C++ code. Their contributions centered on improving the robot's controller, particularly the utilization of joints, as well as modifying the kinematic transformations and code for collision detection. They also introduced new classes to support a more flexible support system for the bipedal locomotion plan.
Fast, continuous interpolation of discrete datasets in Julia
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Performance Engineer
Contributions:12 commits, 9 PRs, 27 comments in 4 years
Contributions summary:Robin primarily focused on optimizing the performance and efficiency of the interpolation library. Their commits included turning on precompilation, speeding up core functions using `@generated` functions, replacing inefficient code with broadcasting, and directly computing element types to enhance performance. They also addressed compatibility issues and refactored code related to data type handling, demonstrating a focus on low-level optimization.
splinescontinuousdiscreteinterpolationjulia
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Robin Deits - Robotics Engineer at Boston Dynamics