Matthew Powelson

Matthew began his career as a robotics researcher at Southwest Research Institute where he worked on a variety of industrial automation applications integrating advanced perception and robot motion planning technologies through the ROS Industrial ecosystem. As an active ROS Industrial developer, he frequently contributes to a variety of open source robotics projects such as the Tesseract motion planning framework and the TrajOpt motion planner. Matthew holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Tennessee Technological University where he dabbled in projects from dry adhesives for climbing robots to machine learning for crop health monitoring. In his free time Matthew enjoys hiking with his wife, Angel, woodworking, and throwing disc golf discs into lakes.