Stephen Hart
Roboticist at RAI Institute
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolStephen Hart is a roboticist and project lead at the Robotics and AI Institute with over a decade of experience designing dexterous manipulation, shared autonomy, and cognitive software architectures for complex robots. He led research and development at TRACLabs and as Behavior & Planning Lead on NASA-JSC humanoid programs like Robonaut 2 and Valkyrie, transitioning space-focused robotics software into automotive and industry applications. His PhD work at UMass Amherst addressed longitudinal learning and knowledge representation for humanoid skill acquisition, reflecting a blend of developmental psychology and machine learning in his approach. Stephen has repeatedly served as PI on NASA-funded SBIRs and built reusable behavior programming architectures that simplify deploying autonomy across platforms. He combines hands-on embedded and perception systems work with high-level cognitive models, making him adept at turning research prototypes into operational systems. Based in Somerville, he brings rare depth in both humanoid robotics for high-stakes missions and pragmatic industry transitions.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
M.S; B.S, Computer Science; Computer Systems Engineering, M.S; B.S, Computer Science; Computer Systems Engineering at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Github Skills (27)
lists10
ros10
inverse9
inverse-kinematics9
solver8
robot8
robotics8
grasp8
robot-control7
ros-control6
trac5
planning5
moveit5
kinematics5
infrastructure4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
traclabs/trac_ik-release
Mar 2021 - May 2021
Contributions:2526 commits, 525 pushes, 60 branches in 2 months
swhart115/nasa_robot_teleop
Jan 2015 - May 2015
Contributions:167 commits, 1 PR, 170 pushes in 4 months
moveit
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