Raghvendra V Cowlagi

r<lastname>@gatech.edu

I am a researcher at the Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. R&D Center at Cambridge, MA, USA. My research interests are in all aspects of autonomous aerial and terrestrial vehicles, including their onboard intelligence and control, their safe and reliable integration into existing infrastructure, and their interactions with human supervisors.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked with with Prof. Emilio Frazzoli.  I completed a Ph.D. at the School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, a Master's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor's degree at the University of Mumbai. My doctoral thesis advisor at Georgia Tech was Prof. Panagiotis Tsiotras.

Career Highlights

Research Overview

I am interested in characterizing and advantageously leveraging the inter-dependencies between the perception, planning, and control subsystems of autonomous vehicles.

Here is a video that illustrates that high-level strategic planning must somehow incorporate low-level control constraints. In this video, the driver's strategy is simple: "reverse direction". However, the path planned for executing this strategy is clearly unacceptable.

Here is a video that illustrates the converse: plans incorporating control constraints are not necessarily strategically sound.

In my Ph. D. thesis,  I addressed the problem of incorporating vehicle dynamical constraints in discrete path planning. I proposed a hierarchical solution to this problem, and I was able to show significant improvements in the quality of resultant trajectories, as compared with probabilistic sampling-based algorithms.

Currently, I am investigating the inter-dependence between perception and planning, as part of this MURI.

RVC Photo

News

Apr 12, 2012: Seminar at United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, CT

Mar 26, 2012: Seminar at Duke University, Durham, NC

Mar 2, 2012: IEEE SMCB paper accepted for publication

Feb 18, 2012: Seminar at Aurora Flight Sciences RDC, Cambridge, MA

Feb 7, 2012: Seminar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA

Jan. 2, 2012: ICRA 2012 paper accepted

Sep 28, 2011: Talk at IROS 2011, San Francisco, CA for this paper

Sep 13, 2011: IEEE T-Ro paper accepted for publication

Apr 18, 2011: Thesis defense!

Feb 07, 2011: Talk at the Robotics Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

Jan 13, 2011: Invited talk at the Program for Systems and Control, IIT Bombay, India

Dec 15, 2010: Talk at the 49th IEEE CDC, Atlanta, GA for this paper

Sep 07, 2010: Talk at ESREL 2010, Rhodes, Greece for this paper