Brian Gerkey is Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage. Before joining Willow Garage, he was a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI, and before that, a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. Prior to working on ROS, Brian was founder and co-lead developer on the open source Player Project (http:/ /playerstage.sf.net), which still produces one of the most widely-used software platforms for robotics research and education.For his work on Player and ROS, Brian was named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35) by the MIT Technology Review in 2011. Brian has presented at numerous robotics conferences over the last 10… years; recently he was a keynote speaker at SIMPAR 2010, and gave tech talks at Google I/O 2011 at OSCON 2011.