Kostas Bekris, Rutgers University

Abstract

Robotics is attracting significant interest given its potential impact and recent progress in mechanisms and sensors, as well as increased access to computational resources and data. At the core of the field, however, lie critical and long standing algorithmic challenges. This talk will highlight some of the problems in robotics of foundational importance as well as recent progress achieved. The challenges include how to compute high-quality paths for high-dimensional robotic systems as well as the combinatorial challenges that arise when multiple robots have to interact with multiple objects in an environment.

Speaker Bio: Kostas Bekris is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. His research is in designing practically efficient algorithms with desirable formal guarantees in robotics, especially for motion planning and for coordination among multiple robots. He is recipient of an early CAREER Faculty Award by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and currently leads an NSF-funded National Robotics Initiative project on learning in robotic manipulation with soft adaptive hands. Bekris joined Rutgers in 2012 and has been engaged with a variety of DIMACS and CCICADA projects, particularly those involving modeling and simulation of large numbers of physically-realistic agents in domains, such as transportation planning and security. He is also a leader of DATA-INSPIRE, a new transdisciplinary TRIPODS Institute based at DIMACS.

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