Research
My overall research goal is to make robots useful to people who need them. This includes healthcare and other service industries. I currently work on Pursuit-Evasion Games with Dr. Isler.
Current Work
A pursuit-evasion game is a scenario where one player (the pursuer) tries to capture another player (the evader) while the evader tries to avoid capture. The general formulation and its variants have been called the Cop-Robber game, the Lion-and-Man game, the Princess and the Monster, the Lady in the Lake and a host of other interesting names, depending on what assumptions were made. We study this game from a robotics perspective - the players are mobile robots and the task can be thought of as surveillance, tracking, search-and-rescue or traffic management. We have strong theoretical results and as part of ongoing work, we are developing a mobile robot workspace to study the challenges in implementation.
Publications
- V. Isler and N. Karnad. The Role of Information in the Cop-Robber Game. Theoretical Computer Science, 2008. Note: Accepted to the Special Issue on Graph Searching.
- N. Karnad and V. Isler. Bearing-Only Pursuit. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2008.
Past Work
- Nearest neighbor search in higher dimensions.
Mentored by Dr. Manik Varma, Microsoft Research Labs, India. Spring 2006. - Steiner Minimal Trees using a Modified Neural Self-Organization Technique.
Mentored by Dr. Atanendu Sekhar Mandal, CEERI, Pilani, India. Fall 2005. - Optimal Bandwidth Reservation for Hose-Model VPNs.
Mentored by Professor Chittaranjan Hota, BITS, Pilani, India. Fall 2004. - MIDAS: Machine Inventory Data Administration System.
Mentored by Mr. S. K. Jha and Mr. S. Venkateswaran, Indian Overseas Bank, Chennai, India. Summer 2003.