I am an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Temple University. I seek to enable teams of mobile robots to autonomously explore and gather information with limited a priori knowledge of the given situation, turning sensor data into actionable information. My work has immediate application to a broad range of scenarios, including infrastructure inspection, security and surveillance, mapping, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and search and rescue. In any of these scenarios there is uncertainty in the environment, the sensors, and the robots. Additionally, the number of objects of interest (e.g., injured persons in a first responder scenario) is often unknown, and there may be unpredictable physical phenomena. By developing mathematical tools and building systems that explicitly consider and reason about all of these sources of uncertainty, I seek to improve the performance of robotic teams in real-world applications.

From July 2015 to June 2016 I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania working under the supervision of Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. George Pappas.  In June 2015 I completed my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Prof. Vijay Kumar.  My dissertation was on Multi-Robot Active Information Gathering Using Random Finite Sets.

I received my BS and MS, both in Mechanical Engineering, from Northwestern University.  While there, I worked with Prof. Kevin Lynch on several projects related to parameter identification of dynamic systems and non-grasping manipulation (e.g., rolling, sliding, and bouncing).