OSRF is pleased to welcome Dirk Thomas! Dirk has more than 6 years of professional software development experience. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2010, which was concentrated on Robotics Middleware.

Dirk has been a successful RoboCuper since 2003 as part of the Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels in the Sony Aibo league as well as the Humanoid Kidsize team Darmstadt Dribblers. Before joining OSRF, Dirk worked at Willow Garage leading the development of the new build system in ROS during the Groovy release, developing the framework for Qt-based graphical ROS tools rqt and maintaining the core ROS packages. Dirk is excited to join OSRF and will be working on the next generation of ROS as well as improving the supporting infrastructure.