NEWS: I will be defending my dissertation on January 6 at 9:00am in E2-599. All are welcome.
My research interests are in the use of stochastic optimal control for motion coordination in autonomous multi-robot systems.
A robot team provides a scalable and robust approach to complex tasks like search and rescue, monitoring and sampling of contaminants or natural phenomena, and exploration of arenas hostile to humans, for example.
For each agent in the team to observe, reason, act and coordinate reliably and independently, it should be able to anticipate the uncertainty in the motion and actions of its neighbors and plan accordingly.
Along these lines, we have applied techniques from stochastic optimal control to control a Dubins vehicle to achieve specified distance from a subject (a tagged animal, a neighbor robot, etc.) with an unknown future trajectory, or in the presence of uncertain winds.
Computational complexity is often a limiting factor in many numerical methods, so this line of research also considers probabilistic and statistical methods to compute the optimal control; see our journal article on formation control, for example.
See some of my publications for more information.
My Ph.D. adviser is Dr.-Ing. Dejan Milutinović.
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064