Kim's Webpage

I graduated with my Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in December of 2000. My advisor was Red Whittaker. I am now working for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

My primary research interests are space robots and mission planning -- specifically, how outdoor remote robots can autonomously plan navigational tasks considering solar energy generation as well as other attributes such as area coverage. My main project has been the Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search. The Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites is a project to send an autonomous rover to the ice fields in Antarctica to find meteorites. In the Dec 1999 - Feb 2000 season, I traveled to Antarctica with our robot to demonstrate its abilities (see pictures here!). Software I have written includes the mission planner which oversees the actions of the robot, and a navigational planner which generates plans for covering an ice field, among other tasks. In the summer of 1999, I also traveled to the Canadian Arctic, to participate in an expedition to Haughton Crater. While there, I observed scientists at work exploring this Mars-analog region, to study how robots could assist such explorers in the future (see pictures here!).

For more information about my research (not very up to date), click here. This page also contains links to my thesis. For my resume (updated March 2000), click here.

I organized and worked with a team for the FIRST National Robotics Competition for four years at CMU. This competition brings together engineers from corporations and universities with students and teachers from local high schools. Together, they design and build a robot under a fast-paced schedule to compete in a different game every year. For the past 3 years (1997-2000), Carnegie Mellon has used our grant money from NASA Headquarters to sponsor Taylor Allderdice High School. The kickoff workshop for the competition occurs in January, and teams have six weeks to build a robot. Regional competitions take place throughout the country, mostly in March, and the national competition takes place at Epcot in Disneyworld, Orlando, Florida, in April.

Publications

Various robot Web pages