Lars Kayser
Associate Researcher
Greater Hamburg Area Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLars Kayser is an experienced robotics software engineer and researcher with nine years building and maintaining motion-planning systems, currently serving as an Associate Researcher at the German Aerospace Center in the Greater Hamburg Area. He previously scaled MoveIt development and integration as Chief MoveIt Architect and Senior Software Engineer at PickNik Robotics, contributing both backend code and user-facing visualization features. Lars has a strong open-source footprint in the flagship MoveIt and MoveIt2 projects, where he ported components to ROS2, unified logging, fixed critical bugs and improved trajectory visualization and tutorials. His background bridges applied research and production engineering—authoring documentation and tutorials as well as low-level C++ fixes that prevent segfaults and improve robustness. Trained with an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg, he combines academic rigor with pragmatic system-level problem solving. A not-obvious strength is his simultaneous focus on developer experience and runtime safety, improving tooling and docs while hardening core libraries.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of Hamburg
Github Skills (11)
c-language10
develop10
robotics10
moveit10
cprogramming-language10
motion-planning10
ros10
sphinx10
documentation10
rviz9
kinematics9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
moveit/moveit2
Oct 2019 - Jan 2023
:robot: MoveIt for ROS 2
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1153 reviews, 263 commits, 598 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Lars made several code changes to the moveit_core/utils/include/moveit/utils/robot_model_test_utils.h header and moveit_core/kinematic_constraints/src/kinematic_constraint.cpp files, fixing messages in a moveit_utils header file and unifying logging in moveit_core. The user also applied a new function geometric_shapes::solidPrimitiveDimCount() to the moveit_core/kinematic_constraints/src/utils.cpp file. The user also made multiple changes to moveit_core, moveit_ros, and moveit_planners to port to ROS2.
moveitros
moveit/moveit_tutorials
Oct 2017 - Mar 2021
A sphinx-based centralized documentation repo for MoveIt
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:7 reviews, 8 commits, 12 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Lars primarily contributed to the repository by adding and updating documentation and tutorials for the MoveIt framework. This includes creating a new tutorial on constraint database approximation, updating the time parameterization tutorial, and adding a tutorial on MoveIt Grasps. The user also provided documentation for a specific OMPL parameter and updated the benchmarking tutorial. Finally, the user applied a new clang-format configuration to the project, improving code style consistency across the documentation.
moveit
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