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I am Professor with the Robotics Institute and National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), both part of School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. I'm also a co-founder of TravelWits.com, a site that uses techniques from Artificial Intelligence to find cheaper ways to travel, and a founder of RobotWits (acquired by Waymo) aimed at developing advanced planning and decision-making technologies for self-driving vehicles. Research: My general research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. More specifically, my group studies such questions as high-dimensional planning in real-time, planning that "learns how to plan" based on experience, automatic generation of compact representation of planning problems, high-dimensional planning under uncertainty in real-time and others. Most of our approaches are centered around the development of new graph search algorithms for real-time planning on huge graphs, study of new graph search algorithms for learning how to search these graphs efficiently from experience and methods for learning compact graph representations of planning problems. My group strives to develop methods with rigorous theoretical guarantees and use these methods to build planners for physical robots performing challenging tasks in real-world environments. Some of the robotic systems my group does planning for include mobile manipulators, aerial vehicles, multi-robot systems, and humanoid-like robots (see some of the robots in my lab below). I do get easily motivated, however, by other interesting planning problems. During my 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at CMU, I worked with Tony Stentz on multi-agent planning with adversaries. During the same time, I have also worked on the design and implementation of a complex maneuvers planner for the CMU vehicle that won the Urban Challenge race (the third DARPA Grand Challenge). During my Ph.D. studies at CMU, my advisors were Geoff Gordon and Sebastian Thrun (presently at Stanford). Before enrolling into the Ph.D. program at CMU I have been a graduate student for two years in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where I worked with Ronald Arkin at Mobile Robot Laboratory and Sven Koenig. |
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