The Robotics Institute

I am currently interested in planning in deterministic and probabilistic domains. So far, the motivation for my research has been the navigation and coordination of autonomous robotic systems. For example, nowadays I work on the problem of path planning for a robot (or multiple robots) in partially unknown environments that can employ scout robots to perform additional sensing of the enivornment. Using these scouts the robot can substantially speed up the time it takes for it to reach its goal location. This planning problem is high-dimensional and stochastic. I am therefore mainly interested in researching anytime planning methods that can solve such problems the best they can in real-time and can improve the plan while it is being executed. At the same time, I try to develop algorithms that can be analyzed theoretically and can provide guarantees on the suboptimalities of their solutions. In addition to planning I am also interested in other areas of artificial intelligence involving machine learning, reinforcement learning and graph searches.