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Ragesh Kumar Ramachandran

Planning and Control Engineer

Zoox

Biography

I’m a Planning and Control Engineer at Zoox. Prior to joining Zoox, I was a Post Doctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California in the Robotics Embedded Systems Lab (RESL) under supervision of Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme. I finished my PhD at Arizona State University in the Autonomous Collective System Lab (ACS) under supervision of Dr. Spring Berman. While at ASU, I worked on developing strategies for mapping environmental features of interest – specifically obstacles, collision-free paths, generating a metric map and estimating scalar density fields– in an unknown domain using data obtained by a swarm of resource constrained robots. Currently at RESL, I’m mostly involved with the development of mathematical models of sub-network failures, e.g., how the failure of one agent leads to a whole sub-network failure, and the design of reliable topologies which mitigates the effects of the failure on the team task performance. However, I have very broad interests in the fields of multi-robot systems, control theory and applied differential geometry. More recently, I have been investigating the application of differential geometry and manifold learning on motion planning. I have evaluated my work on many different platforms such as Crazyfiles, Turtlebot3 Burger and Pheeno.

Before joining ASU, I studied Civil Engineering at National institue of Technology Calicut (NITC). In May 2011, I graduated from NITC obtaining a Bachelor of Technology degree. I worked at Gammon India for a few months after obtaining my undergraduate degree in Civil engineering.

Outside my research I spend time reading, listening to music, playing chess, learning topics in Physics, playing Badminton and watching movies.

Interests

  • Multi-robot system
  • Swarm robotics
  • Applied Topology and Differential geometry
  • Network and Graph theory

Education

  • PhD in Mechanical Engineering, 2018

    Arizona State University

  • M.S in Mechanical Engineering, 2018

    Arizona State University

  • B.Tech in Civil Engineering, 2011

    National Institute of Technology Calicut, India

Projects

Perimeter Defense using multi-robot system

Defending a given perimeter using a team of robots

Motion planning on Manifolds

Motion planning on a sequence of Manifolds.

Resilience in multi-robot system

Resilience in multi-robot system under task considerations.

Swarm mapping

Mapping an environment using a swarm of robots.

Pogosuit

A phase oscillator based suit.

Conference Proceedings

Workshop articles & Abstracts

(2019). Post Processing of Occupancy Grid Maps using Persistent Homology. ICRA 2019 Workshop on Emerging Topological Techniques in Robotics.

Project

(2019). Resilience by Reconfiguration: Exploiting Heterogeneity in Robot Teams. ICRA 2019 Workshop on Resilient Robot Teams: Composing, Acting, and Learning.

Project

(2016). Topological Mapping Using a Heterogeneous Robotic Swarm. ICRA 2016 Workshop on Emerging Topological Techniques in Robotics.

Project

Teaching

Applied Mathematics in Robotics (Summer 2019)

This is a seminar course aimed at introducing abstract mathematical concepts which are widely used in robotics.

Contact

  • 480-522-9070
  • 3710 McClintock Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90089-9121
  • Enter the RTH Building and take the elevator to Room 426 on Floor 4
  • EMAIL