Davis S. Catherman

#!/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/Curriculum Vitae

About Me

Work Experience

Education

Publications

#!/bin/Medium Articles

Profile

Topic: Apptainer