Tully Foote
Open Source Lead at Intrinsic
Menlo Park, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTully Foote is an Open Source Lead at Intrinsic in Menlo Park with 17 years of experience leading engineering and community efforts across the ROS and robotics ecosystem. He previously held leadership roles at Open Robotics and Willow Garage and is a prolific contributor to core ROS and ROS 2 projects—including rcl, rclpy, rclcpp, geometry/geometry2, rviz, catkin and rosdep—working across libraries, build systems, CI, testing and docs. Tully blends backend and build engineering with DevOps and test automation, regularly resolving subtle runtime issues like clock/time source management, startup race conditions, and message/namespace compatibility to keep large ecosystems interoperable. He also improves developer workflows by adding Docker-based doc builds, deployment scripts and automation, and has led significant porting efforts to modern toolchains. An early autonomous-vehicle researcher who worked on DARPA challenge teams at Caltech and Penn, he pairs deep robotics domain knowledge with community-building skills to move research into resilient production use.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
California Institute of TechnologyMS, MS at University of Pennsylvania
Stackoverflow
540reputation
6kreached
9answers
0questions
jekyll
top-5%
Github Skills (95)
dependency-management10
dockerce10
documentations10
messaging10
python10
testing10
bash10
drivers10
cmake10
automation10
ci-cd10
build-automation10
rcpp10
rcc10
refactoring10
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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