Leadership

 

Vanessa Yamzon Orsi

Chief Executive Officer

Vanessa was formerly CFO of Open Robotics and has been with the organization since 2014. She has run the financial and operational side of the organization since 2019. Before joining Open Robotics, Vanessa had fifteen years of experience working with various companies and nonprofit organizations in Silicon Valley.

Geoffrey Biggs

Chief Technical Officer

Geoffrey Biggs was a software engineer at Open Source Robotics Corporation, where he worked mainly on ROS and Open-RMF. Prior to this he worked as a senior researcher at Japan's Institute of Advanced Industrial Engineering Technology, and an engineering manager at Tier IV, Inc., where he was part of the technical leadership team of the Autoware Foundation. Geoff has nearly 20 years of experience working with and on open-source software, beginning with the Player Project, which he started contributing to while studying for his PhD at The University of Auckland. In recent years this has bloomed into related community activities: He has led the organisation of ROSCon JP since 2017 and prior to the pandemic regularly gave free tutorials on ROS to the Japanese ROS community. Geoff loves supporting those who create amazing robot applications by providing them with the software engineering tools and knowledge to do so. He is also constantly looking for ways to convince the world that formal methods are great. Outside of this work, he spends his time building anything that can be built with wood or plastic, and torturing himself with mountains. Originally from New Zealand, Geoff has lived in Japan for 15 years.

 

Board of Directors

Brian Gerkey

Chairman of the Board

Brian recently joined Intrinsic as their Director of Open Robotics. He was previously co-founder and CEO of OSRF, where for 10 years he led the team that was responsible for ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF. Brian has worked on the ROS project since 2008, contributing to the development and release of one of the most widely used robot software platforms in robotics research, education, and industry. He is also the founding and former lead developer on the open-source Player Project, a predecessor to ROS. For his work on Player and ROS, Brian was recognized by MIT Technology Review with the TR35 award and by Silicon Valley Business Journal with their 40 Under 40 award. He earned his PhD in Computer Science at USC.

Ryan Gariepy

Board Member

Ryan Gariepy is co-founder and CTO of both Clearpath Robotics and OTTO Motors. Along with his involvement with Open Robotics, he co-founded and co-chairs the Canadian Robotics Council, is an advisor to several startups and venture capital groups, and helped found the Next Generation Manufacturing Canada initiative. He is a regular speaker, panelist, and expert guest on topics including robotics, AI, and technology policy. Ryan completed both a B.A.Sc. degree in Mechatronics Engineering and a M.A.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and has over sixty pending patents in the field of intelligent systems.

Steve Cousins

Board Member

Dr. Steve Cousins is the Chief Technology Officer of Relay Robotics. As founder and CEO of Savioke, he developed and deployed Relay – an autonomous delivery robot that works in human environments to help people. Steve was previously President and CEO of Willow Garage, and is a founding board member of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Steve received the IEEE/IFR Award for Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation award in 2017. Steve’s PhD is from Stanford University, and his BS and MS computer science degrees are from Washington University.

 

Sabine Hauert

Board Member

Sabine Hauert is Associate Professor of Swarm Engineering at University of Bristol. She leads a team of researchers working on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Many of her robots are powered by ROS. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms at MIT and EPFL. She’s involved in more than 30M GBP in grant funding and has served on national and international committees, including the UK Robotics Growth Partnership, the Royal Society Working Group on Machine Learning, and several IEEE boards. She is President and Executive Trustee of non-profits robohub.org and aihub.org, which connect the robotics and AI communities to the public. As an expert in science communication, she is often invited to speak with media and at conferences (over 50 invited talks).

Yuki Nakagawa

Board Member

Yuki is the Founder and CEO at RT Corporation and has been involved in Japanese humanoid and home robotics for almost her entire career. Yuki is on the organizing committee of ROSCon JP, the local ROSCon for the Japanese ROS community, and has been involved in educational robots in Japan for many years. She started RT Corporation in 2005, a company that develops, sells, and trains university students and professional engineers about service robots, and became its representative director. RT is the official ROS supporter of Denso Wave COBOTTA. In 2020, she received the Strait of Magellan Award. In 2022, she was certified as a fellow of robot education and food robotics from the Robotics Society of Japan. Her company is one of the early adopters of ROS in Japan.

“I have not only been passionate about robots for almost my entire life, but equally passionate about teaching and training students and engineers about the promise of the robotics industry. I can’t imagine a better organization to join that will allow me to continue my efforts to grow the worldwide ROS community.” - Yuki Nakagawa, President and CEO, RT Corporation

 

Organization and Mission

Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. (OSRF) was established in 2012. OSRF is incorporated in California as a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation and is recognized in the USA as a tax-exempt public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. In 2016 OSRF created a subsidiary, Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), to facilitate collaboration with the robotics industry. In 2018 OSRC created a further subsidiary, Open Source Robotics Corporation Singapore Pte Ltd (OSRC-SG), to allow greater engagement in the Asia Pacific region. OSRC-SG is incorporated in Singapore as a Private Limited Company. In December 2022, the business of OSRC and OSRC-SG was acquired by Intrinsic, an Alphabet company.

OSRF operates under the Open Robotics brand, to achieve its mission to "support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development."

We aim to be the hub of the global robotics community. To that end, we create open software and hardware platforms for robotics, and we use those platforms to solve important problems and help others to do the same.