David Coleman

About

David Coleman is a robotics researcher whose work spans motion planning, robotic software engineering, bio-inspired aerial vehicles, and robotics education. He is perhaps best known as a principal contributor to MoveIt!, an open-source motion planning framework that dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for complex robotic software development. His 2014 case study on MoveIt! has accumulated over 350 citations across multiple venues, reflecting its outsized influence on the robotics software community and its widespread adoption across academia and industry. Coleman also advanced experience-based motion planning through his Thunder framework, which uses sparse roadmap spanners to accelerate high-dimensional planning by learning from prior solutions — earning over 70 citations. A second major research thread involves the design and aeromechanics of bio-inspired flight, where Coleman led the development of a 62-gram hovering robotic hummingbird, producing a sustained body of work from mechanical design through flight control and aeromechanical analysis. He has additionally contributed to robotics pedagogy, authoring a scalable one-year undergraduate curriculum that has influenced how computational robotics is taught at scale. Together, these contributions mark Coleman as a versatile and practically impactful figure in modern robotics research.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study

   269 citations · 2014
2. 2
   Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study

   86 citations · 2014
3. 3
   Design, Development and Flight-Testing of a Robotic Hummingbird

   77 citations · 2015
4. 4
   Experience-based planning with sparse roadmap spanners

   73 citations · 2015
5. 5
   A One-Year Introductory Robotics Curriculum for Computer Science Upperclassmen

   59 citations · 2012
6. 6
   Development of a Robotic Hummingbird Capable of Controlled Hover

   22 citations · 2017
7. 7
   Simultaneous localization, mapping, and manipulation for unsupervised object discovery

   21 citations · 2015
8. 8
   On the Development of a Robotic Hummingbird

   8 citations · 2016
9. 9
   Aeromechanics Analysis of a Hummingbird-Like Flapping Wing in Hover

   7 citations · 2018
10. 10
    Methods for stabilizing the longitudinal dynamics of a biomimetic robotic hummingbird in hovering flight

    5 citations · 2025

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links