My name is Manuel Meraz my goal is life is to be of service to you all. I've found that writing software and programming robots is my personal calling, and I would like to be able to work on writing open software independently.

I grew up in San Diego, CA and was the first in my family to be born in the U.S. and attend university. Having a natural inclination towards computers, I went to university and got my degree in Computer Science & Engineering. During my undergrad I participated in various robotics competition and in my summers I was very fortunate to be funded for two REU's, both involving swarm robotics.

For two years I worked at a national lab writing high performance physics simulations on their HPC's. I spent those two years practicing my C++ and learning as much as I could. Towards the tail end of those two years my time became less bearable at the lab as I wanted to work with robots more and more. So, I moved to Pittsburgh after I was offered a position at Carnegie Mellon as a robotics engineer.

Now I write robot software as my day job, but I also still work on personal projects that I'd like to turn into my own consulting business in the future.

My goal in life is to be a part of building great robots, but also use these robots to be of service to humanity. I am not sure what the optimal way of doing this, but writing software is the most convenient and effective for my skill set.

You might ask, why not use ROS (Robot Operating System)? The reason is, it's not good enough. ROS and ROS2 have various problems; the core issue being that it is targeted at academia and prototyping. Meaning that performance is not critical.

I am to prioritize three aspects in the software I will write:

• performance
• correctness
• security

At the moment I am missing the security component, but I will fill that gap in the future.

Most of my projects so far have been smaller, short term projects. My latest project right now is the framework called Flow, which is a high performance robot communication framework. This is built off of C++ 20 coroutines and maximizes cache friendliness. This project is still a work in progress and I aim to have this running on real robots by the end of this year (2021).