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GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2005
November 18, 11:00 AM, 307 Levine Hall
Lydia Kavraki
Rice University
“Sampling-Based Motion Planners: Recent Developments and Future Challenges”
Abstract: Sampling-based motion planners have enjoyed
widespread success in the robotics community and have fueled significant
research developments. Our laboratory has been actively involved in the
development of sampling-based planners since their conception. This talk
will relate the current state-of-the-art and detail on-going work on developing
planners for systems with increased physical realism by addressing difficulties
that arise in handling dynamics and high-dimensional geometry.
Biography: Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor
of Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University.
She also holds a joint appointment at the Department of Structural and
Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston. Kavraki received her B.A. in Computer Science from
the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from
Stanford University. Her research contributions are in physical algorithms
and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning, assembly planning,
micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation) and computational
structural biology and bioinformatics (modeling of biomolecular interactions,
molecular deisgn, computer-assisted drug design and the large-scale functional
annotation of proteins). Kavraki has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed
journal and conference publications and is one of the authors of a new
robotics textbook published in 2005 by MIT Press. She served as an associate
editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation from 2000
to 2002; and currently is an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics Magazine,
the IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and
a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced
Robotics. Kavraki was the recipient of the 2000 Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her technical contributions.
She has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, the Early
Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation,
a recognition as a top young investigator from the MIT Technology Review
Magazine in 2002, and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and
teaching from Rice University in 2004. Kavraki is a Fellow of the American
Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the World
Technology Network. More information on Kavraki's work can be found in:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki
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