At the Robotics Institute, my primary research is with my adviser Tony Stentz on complex multi-robot coordination strategies. I am developing a market-based mulitorbot coordination framework called Hoplites that facilitates tight, complex interactions between teammates. It is intended for spatially complex problems such as perimeter sweeping, constrained exploration, and the art gallery problems. This work is closely related to that of others in the R-Commerce Research Group, specifically Bernardine Dias and Rob Zlot.

More details are on the Hoplites homepage.

I am the primary researcher in a new V-Unit project under the TechBridgeWorld Initiative. This research project is aimed at developing assistive technology to combat the high rate of illiteracy among the blind in developing communities. Specifically, we will design, implement, and test an adaptive Braille writing tutor for the Mathru School for the Blind in Bangalore, India.

More details on the Braille Writing Tutor project homepage

I spent the Fall, 2005 semester with the Swarm Intelligent Systems (SWIS) research group at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. I performed a comparative study of threshold-based and market-based approaches to multirobot coordination using the innovative modeling techniques developed by this group.

I, along with three other students, founded the BRAIN team at Cornell to build an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and participate annually in the AUVSI's autonomous underwater vehicle competition. Now known as CU-AUV, this team has become a class in the College of Engineering and is advised by Dr. Kevin Kornegay. My primary role on this team was co-team-leader, both administratively and technically. I also worked on the sensors suite and developed a hydrophone array to triangulate the location of a pinger.

After taking Dr. Bruce Land's course on microcontrollers (ECE 476), I decided to do an independent project building a hexapod walker I named BUG using only a small micrcontroller chip (the Atmel AVR 8515). BUG can walk forwards, backwards, turn left and right, and navigate through small mazes. It has just reactive control and senses using two little antennae.

During my senior year, I worked in Cornell's astronomy department with Dr. Jim Houck and others on data analysis tools for the Space Infra-Red Telescope Facilty. The project was a collaboration between Nasa, JPL, CalTech, Cornell and others. The facility was successfully launched in August, 2003.