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About

Tully Foote is a pivotal figure in the robotics community, best known for his foundational contributions to the Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROS 2. His key research areas include distributed robotic systems, robust navigation, and software infrastructure for autonomous robots. Foote’s most impactful work is the landmark paper "Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild" (2022), which has garnered over 1,270 citations and defines the scalable, modular architecture powering modern commercial robotics. He also authored "tf: The transform library" (2013, 197 citations), a critical tool for managing coordinate frames in complex robotic systems. Foote demonstrated extraordinary system-level robustness with "The Office Marathon" (2010, 516 citations), where a robot autonomously navigated 26.2 miles in a real office environment using a novel voxel-based 3D mapping algorithm. His work on autonomous door opening and self-docking for recharging (2010, 176 citations) further showcases his ability to integrate perception, manipulation, and navigation into reliable, real-world systems. As a long-time ROS core maintainer, Foote’s contributions have shaped the standard toolkit used by thousands of researchers and engineers worldwide.