#!/bin/Curriculum Vitae

About Me

With a foundation in Computer and Robotics Engineering, I launched my career through multi-year contract roles where I specialized in transforming company R&D platforms. My work involved redesigning core infrastructure and introducing containerized AI, which significantly sped up development cycles.

During my subsequent Ph.D. studies, I continued to build on this experience with back-to-back internships at Waymo, adding to my previous long-term co-op at NASA. This blend of infrastructure and robotics expertise led to my current position on a NASA STTR contract, where I now design and implement autonomous systems for multi-robot swarms on the lunar surface.

Work Experience

  • Research Scientist / Robotics Engineer, STTR Contract, NASA 2023 - Present
    NASA STTR Phase II
    • Develop multi-robot autonomy and with swarm theory of mind reasoning on the lunar surface
    • Restructured efforts from successful Phase I towards key focus areas for Phase II rampup and development
    • Oversaw iterating of experiment development to align with design goals, enabled unified control of the robots
    • Demonstrated accurate modeling of interactions that yield opportunities for theory of mind knowledge transfer

    NASA STTR Phase I 2021 - 2023
    • Orchestrated large-scale HPC simulation infrastructure to evaluate 6 to 40 robots over 40k simulated hours
    • Developed a user-centric design to support seamless data sharing across swarms through local robot interactions
    • Implemented a merkelized storage structure for efficient internal knowledge access for prediction and sharing
  • Roboticist / SWE Intern, Waymo 2022
    Behavior Planner, Prediction, & Router
    • Implemented routing overlays such as particle flow graphs, improving tight turns with dynamic roadgraphs
    • Leveraged previous developments on tree based infrastructure for better navigation hairpin turn scenarios
    • Recognized by FTEs for leadership in developing streamlined pipelines, improving intern infrastructure usage


    Behavior Planner, Prediction, & Controls 2021
    • Developed plugin-based online graph sampling framework for path planning, supporting non-uniform sampling
    • Introduced trajectory generation sampling approach to improve narrow passage and construction navigation
  • Software Engineer Contract, Kuva Systems 2019 - 2021
    Software Engineering R&D
    • Redesigned the internal R&D platform from the ground up with UML, enabling rapid development of spinoffs
    • Introduce AI to the company with a containerized framework for cloud-portability and large-scale training
    • Provided supervised machine learning models, identifying methane plumes despite difficult windy conditions
    • Developed a workflow for unsupervised learning utilizing the intensive statistical model as training data
    • Created configuration scripts to optimize for a production ready deployment that requires 70% less time
  • Software Engineer Contract, SIC Drone 2019
    Simulation and Engineering Planning
    • Oversaw development of team interns on UAV control algorithm to adjust thrust on VTOL arms
    • Optimized team efficiency through formalization of agile development workflow saving 10 hours each week
    • Introduced dynamic modeling of drone saving thousands of dollars of hardware by simulating the control systems
  • Roboticist / SWE Co-op, Canon Inc. 2018
    Advanced Manufacturing Technology
    • Predicted manufacturing failures verified with part inspection using Tensorflow reducing wasted time and material
    • Proposed technology based solutions to guarantee no false-positives for checking outbound shipping containers
  • Software Engineer Co-op, NASA 2016 - 2017
    Safety Critical Avionic Systems
    • Transitioned early testing for next-release code from HITL to SITL, saving thousands of dollars in hardware
    • Augmented safety critical testing with bash scripts and Bamboo unit tests producing strong code verification
    • Created rule based parsing of C++ test case results to provide detailed evaluation for CI/CD environment

Education

  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) December 2025
      Doctor of Philosophy in Robotics Engineering
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) December 2019
      Master of Science in Robotics Engineering
  • Christopher Newport University (CNU) May 2018
      Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
      Minor in Leadership Studies

Publications

  • Catherman, Neville, Bloom, & White, "Reinforcement Learning Adversarial Swarm Dynamics," Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon, March 2020, Raleigh, NC, USA.
    ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • Catherman, Kaminski & Jagetia, "Atlas Humanoid Robot Control with Flexible Finite State Machines for Playing Soccer," Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon, March 2020, Raleigh, NC, USA.
    ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • White & Catherman, "Mobile Robot Controller Performance over Unexpected Terrain Disturbances," Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon, April 2019, Huntsville, AL, USA.
    ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • Conner, Catherman, Enders, Gates, & Gu, "Flexible Manipulation: Finite State Machine-based Collaborative Manipulation," Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon, April 2018, St. Petersburg, FL, USA.
    ieeexplore.ieee.org

#!/bin/Medium Articles

Profile

For all of my articles, checkout out my profile and give me a follow!
medium.com/@dcat52

Topic: Apptainer

How to use Singularity or Apptainer on your HPC System
medium.com/@dcat52/21093970f86f
More Ways to Run Apptainer Containers
medium.com/@dcat52/d6fc688c3f1a
Making your first Apptainer container
medium.com/@dcat52/81b832d82a6f
Apptainer v1.0.0 Officially Released
medium.com/@dcat52/1e30277153f7
Why you should use Apptainer
medium.com/@dcat52/21ef1fe7e0bb
Setting up Apptainer to Make Container Environments
medium.com/@dcat52/8a6c5fd3cd06
VS Code Intellisense Inside an Apptainer Container
medium.com/@dcat52/2526380a4673