Rayomand Vatcha

http://webpages.uncc.edu/~rvatcha/

Rayomand Vatcha got his Masters degree in Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2006. In 2007, he was adjunct faculty at ITT Technical Institute-Charlotte and King’s College in Charlotte. From 2008, he is pursuing Ph.D. degree in Computer Science with research focus on Intelligent Robotics. His major research interest includes enabling complex robots to autonomously move safely in real-world environments without causing any damage to environment and itself. As real-world environments contain objects (obstacles) that are not only complex but also move in an unpredictable fashion, identifying potential obstacles that could hit the robot from sensor is difficult. Current contributions made by him include:

• a novel approach that enables a computer program (called motion-planner) to know if a robot at a particular pose (configuration) at a future time, called as a configuration-time point (CT-point), will surely not collide with any obstacles in the environment, without knowing, detecting or tracking any obstacles.
• an approach to discover if a robot, following along some future continuous motion (called trajectory), will surely not collide with any obstacles of the environment, without knowing the precise motions of obstacles in the environment.
• an approach to facilitate real-time perceiving of collision-free CT-points, from raw sensor data, which is obtained at every new sensing instant.
• an approach to enable motion-planners to plan robot motion safely in real-world environments, in-spite of  considerable computing cost to discover collision-free CT-points that introduces the problem of unsafe stops where the robot could be hit by the obstacle.