Vandi's home page at CMU

VANDANA "VANDI" VERMA

Graduate Student, Ph.D Program
Robotics Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

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phone:
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(412) 512-2340

Smith Hall, #214
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213

This page is outdated. Vandi Verma is now at JPL.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My general research areas are Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. In particular, I am interested in pushing the limits of computational efficiency and optimality of modeling, state estimation and control of increasingly complex autonomous systems in uncertain environments. I am interested in the development of new fundamental theories, as well as in the physical demonstrations of their utility.

THESIS WORK

My thesis is titled Partile Filters for Robot Fault Diagnosis.

There are numerous examples that indicate that real-time methods that are capable of fault diagnosis and adaptive control in the presence of significant uncertainty hold the key to highly autonomous systems that are successful and appear intelligent (and are accepted by humans).

In my thesis, fault detection and identification is represented as a hybrid (discrete/continuous) state-estimation problem. An exact Bayesian solution for this problem is intractable. My thesis work is makes contributions to the theory of probabilistic state-estimation to solve this problem.

PUBLICATIONS

Richard Dearden, Frank Hutter, Reid Simmons, Sebastian Thrun, Vandi Verma, and Thomas Willeke, Real-time Fault Detection and Situational Awareness for Rovers: Report on the Mars Technology Program Task, To appear in the Proceedings of IEEE Aerospace Conference, March 2004. [abstract, ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Vandi Verma, Geoff Gordon, Reid Simmons, and Sebastian Thrun, Particle Filters for Rover Fault Diagnosis, To appear in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine special issue on Human Centered Robotics and Dependability, June 2004. (Invited paper) [abstract, ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Vandi Verma, Sebastian Thrun, and Reid Simmons, Variable Resolution Particle Filter, In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 2003. [abstract, ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Vandi Verma, Geoff Gordon, and Reid Simmons, Efficient Monitoring for Planetary Rovers, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Space (iSAIRAS), May, 2003. [abstract, ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Michael Montemerlo, Joelle Pineau, Nicholas Roy, Sebastian Thrun, and Vandi Verma, Experiences with a Mobile Robotic Guide for the Elderly, Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI, August, 2002. [ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Sebastian Thrun, John Langford, and Vandi Verma, Risk Sensitive Particle Filters, Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December, 2001. [abstract, ps, ps.gz, pdf]
Vandi Verma, John Langford, and Reid Simmons, Non-Parametric Fault Identification for Space Rovers, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Space (iSAIRAS), June, 2001, [ps]
Sanjiv Singh, Reid Simmons, Trey Smith, Anthony Stentz, Vandi Verma, Alex Yahja, and Kurt Schwehr, Recent Progress in Local and Global Traversability for Planetary Rovers, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2000. [pdf]

RECENT PROJECTS AND LABS

Robotic search for Life in the Atacama: This project aims to investigate life in extreme environments. I implemented on-board health monitoring for the rover to autonomously detect anomalies such as non-traversable terrain, insufficient power, unreasonable deviation from navigation plans, and dozens of other faults. I also participated in the field test in the Atacama desert in Chile in April 2003. Currently we are analysing data from the field test, building a new rover, and improving health monitoring and autonomous recovery from faults among other things.

Robot Learning Lab: I have been an active member since 1998. We have weekly meetings and annual retreats to discuss various topics in machine learning, control, and state estimation. Papers from NIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, ICML, and UAI feature in our discussions along with the research work of lab members (including MDPs, POMDPs, SLAM, Mapping, and Game Theory). Sometimes we spend a semester discussing an entire book such as, Graphical Models by Michael Jordan or Optimal Control and Estimation by Stengel.

Field Robotics Center: Since summer 1998 I have been continuously involved with software research, implementation, and testing (in simulation and in the filed) for robots at the Field Robotis Center.

Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab

OTHER PAST PROJECTS

Sun-Synchronous Navigation	Mars Autonomy	Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search
	Morphin is on Mars with the MER rover Spirit! ...albeit much updated, thoroughly tested, and now called GESTALT.	I developed the pan tilt camera, ...and infinite respect for anyone who works with VxWorks.

RECENT INTERNSHIPS

NASA Ames Research Center Summer 2001	NASA Ames Research Center Summer 2000	LAAS-CNRS, France Summer 1999

OTHER INTERESTS

Robotics Seminar
AI Seminar
Machine Learning Lunch
Women@scs
Zonta International
Flying, Argentine tango, Rock and ice climbing, Cooking, Motorcycles, Books, Music, Art...