About

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at University of California San Diego (UCSD). I direct the Existential Robotics Laboratory (ERL). I am affiliated with the Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI) at UCSD.

Before joining UCSD, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), University of Pennsylvania, working with Vijay Kumar. I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on Active Information Acquisition with Mobile Robots at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), University of Pennsylvania in July, 2015. My advisors were George J. Pappas and Kostas Daniilidis. I received an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2012 and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 2008.

Research Interests

My research goal is to develop scientific principles for increasing the reliability, efficiency, and versatility of autonomous robot systems. My research focuses on probabilistic models for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) as well as optimal control and reinforcement learning algorithms for minimizing model uncertainty. I apply these techniques to mobile robots in localization and mapping, environmental monitoring, and security and surveillance applications. The fields relevant to my research are robotics, machine learning, control theory, optimization, and computer vision.

Teaching