Tully Foote
Open Source Lead at Intrinsic
Menlo Park, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTully Foote is an open source leader and engineer with 18 years of experience shaping the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem from low-level time/clock primitives to developer tooling and documentation. Based in Menlo Park, he blends hands-on backend and build engineering with community and DevOps leadership, having managed ROS platform efforts at Open Robotics and now leading open source at Intrinsic. His technical contributions span core ROS and ROS2 repositories—rcl, rclcpp, rclpy, geometry/geometry2, rviz and catkin—where he’s fixed race conditions, modernized builds, and improved test and CI automation. He’s equally comfortable writing Dockerfiles and deployment scripts as he is refactoring C++ time sources or streamlining message migrations, and he often pairs code fixes with improved test coverage. Notably, his work touched high-impact pieces of the ROS stack that many robotics projects depend on, from actionlib to rosdep and visualization tooling. He combines academic training in mechanical engineering with a rare mix of systems-level coding and community-facing product stewardship.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
California Institute of TechnologyMS Mechanical Engineering, MS Mechanical Engineering at University of Pennsylvania
Stackoverflow
540reputation
6kreached
9answers
0questions
jekyll
top-5%
Github Skills (82)
dependency-management10
messaging10
python10
testing10
bash10
cmake10
automation10
build-automation10
rcpp10
rcc10
refactoring10
rcp10
ros10
operating-system10
markdown10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
ros/geometry
Nov 2010 - Aug 2020
Packages for common geometric calculations including the ROS transform library, "tf". Also includes ROS bindings for "bullet" physics engine and "kdl" kinematics/dynamics package.
Role in this project:
Back-end & Build Engineer
Back-end & Build EngineerContributions:7 reviews, 330 commits, 83 PRs in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tully primarily contributed to porting the `geometry` ROS package, which involves common geometric calculations. Their work focused on adapting the code to be compatible with newer versions, specifically targeting Eigen3, which required the modification of numerous files. They also developed and modified scripts to automate porting processes and address compatibility issues with third-party libraries like KDL, as well as upgrading the build to the new build system and updating the dependencies.
physics-enginephysicsroboticskinematicstransform
ros/geometry2
Sep 2010 - Oct 2022
A set of ROS packages for keeping track of coordinate transforms.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:30 reviews, 531 commits, 269 PRs in 12 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Tully's commits involve the implementation of core functionality within the `ros/geometry2` repository, specifically focusing on the low-level manipulation of coordinate transformations. The user's work involved implementing exception handling and core classes as well as integrating the framework for message processing. The user's efforts also focused on updating headers.
roboticsros-packagesroscoordinatekeeping
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