OSRF is pleased to welcome Gonzalo Abella, Esteve Fernandez and Andrei Haidu, our first-ever students for the Google Summer of Code!

Gonzalo is an M.S. student at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. He is a member of the Spiteam RoboCup SPL team. For the last two years, he has been involved in medical research using the Nao robot in therapies for people with Alzheimer’s. As a GSoC member at OSRF, he hopes to improve ROS core by developing a new Parameter API.

Esteve is an M.S. student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, advised by Prof. Vladimir Estivill-Castro and Prof. Jorge Lobo, and a member of the UPF-Griffith RoboCup Standard Platform team. His research focuses on multirobot localization and coordination in unreliable networks. He holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from Universitat de Barcelona. A frequent contributor to free and open source software, Esteve is a PMC member of Apache Thrift and a committer at Twisted, and has given talks at PyCon US and Europython.

Andrei is a fourth semester M.S. student in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), majoring in Software Engineering. Since 2011 he has been working in simulation at the IAS Group from TUM, currently The Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) since the group has moved to the University of Bremen.

We’re excited to work with Gonzalo, Esteve, and Andrei in the coming months, and look forward to their contributions this summer!