I am interested in providing robots with the resourcefulness to autonomously operate in unstructured environments. Such resourcefulness of a robotic platform is determined by many aspects of robotics ranging from the mechanical structure over the electrical and embedded systems to control, planning, and learning. All these aspects are tightly interleaved and are required for a competent robot.
In my dissertation, I followed a holistic approach that includes hardware and software aspects of the design. I developed physical and control capabilities of a robot for performing the same tasks in different ways. Combined with a planner the robot is capable of adapting to variations in the environment or the task. Partial observability and uncertain action outcomes are handled by planning in belief-space. Novel representations enable the belief-space planner to remain tractable for online planning without losing expressiveness.
My work includes significant amounts of hardware and software design of the dynamically stable mobile manipulators uBot-4, uBot-5, uBot-6, and uBot-7 with the aim to create a resourceful platform which is able to exhibit dexterity in both mobility and manipulation.