Tanner Beard
Chief Engineer at The OTUS Project
Brownsville Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTanner Beard is a mechanical and robotics engineer with a hands-on track record across aerospace, automotive, and autonomous systems, currently leading drone tornado research as Chief Engineer at The OTUS Project. A Georgia Tech-trained maker, he has combined academic robotics research and machine learning with industry roles at Tesla and SpaceX, plus embedded flight-control contributions to the widely used Betaflight firmware. He co-founded RotorJackets, building the largest collegiate drone-racing team and tuning control loops that helped secure back-to-back national championships, and has deep experience bringing high-DOF robot hardware and vision systems from CAD to fielded code. Tanner’s work spans mechanical design, CNC/manufacturing, and low-level control software—evident in vision-focused refactors for RoboJackets and crash-recovery features in flight controllers—showing a rare full-stack mechatronics fluency.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of TechnologyDurham Academy
Github Skills (14)
c1710
firmware10
beta-release10
robocup10
embedded10
beta-testing10
beta-versions10
robotics10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
c1110
sys10
controller10
kalman-filter9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
betaflight/betaflight
Nov 2016 - Aug 2024
Open Source Flight Controller Firmware
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 5 PRs, 73 comments in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tanner's primary contributions focused on implementing and refining the "crashflip" feature, a functionality likely related to flight control recovery. They introduced new parameters in the CLI settings for "crashflip," including motor power and expo, and adjusted the flight control mixer logic to incorporate this feature. Further commits included modifications to the RPM limiter, demonstrating a focus on performance and control.
flightcontrollerbetaflightfirmwareflight-controller
RoboJackets/robocup-software
Oct 2019 - Oct 2019
Georgia Tech RoboJackets Software for the RoboCup Small Size League
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 2 PRs in 23 days
Contributions summary:Tanner made several code changes focusing on refactoring and improving the vision system within the RoboJackets software. These changes included refactoring pose-related code, updating camera robot implementations, and addressing ball bounce calculations. Furthermore, the user reverted a previous change related to a utility sign, highlighting a focus on code correctness and maintenance. These contributions centered around enhancing core functionalities within the vision system.
roboticssmall-sizerobojacketsgeorgialeague
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