My research goal is to automate large, mobile equipment operating outdoors in unstructured environments. Examples include excavators and wheel loaders used in surface mining, windrowing machines and combines used in agriculture, continuous miners and haulage systems used in underground mining, and unmanned ground vehicles employed in military scouting operations. For the commercial machines, automation promises to increase productivity, improve safety, and reduce operational costs.

My focus is planning and perception for robots in these applications. In unstructured environments, planning is difficult due to uncertainty. Typically, the robot does not have full information about its environment before it produces a plan. Sensors are able to fill in the missing information as the plan executes, but sensor data itself can be inaccurate. Even with perfect information, robot actions can have unexpected consequences. I investigate techniques for rapidly replanning robot operations in the presence of these types of uncertainty.