CSE Profile: Volkan Isler

Volkan Isler
Assistant Professor

(612) 625-1067
Office: EE/CS 4-213

Interests

Robotics and Automation; Sensor Networks; Geometric Algorithms.

Education

Ph.D. 2004, Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

M.S.E 2000, Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

B.S. 1999, Computer Engineering, Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey)

Volkan Isler specializes in robotic sensor networks and geometric algorithms. He received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award in 2008.

Research

My work mainly focuses on robotic sensor networks which are networks of robots equipped with communication, computation and sensing capabilities. Designing algorithms for robotic sensor networks requires tackling challenging problems that lie at the intersection of robotics, perception and communication.

So far, I have been studying:

  • Pursuit-Evasion Games: How can one or more robots capture an evader who, in turn, tries to avoid capture? In particular, I am interested in understanding what role the information available to the players has on the outcome of the game.
  • Sensor Deployment and Management: How can we deploy a sensor network and control sensing parameters (e.g. location and focus of cameras) so as to accomplish a sensing task such as tracking?

For these problems, my group seeks to develop algorithms with provable performance guarantees (often using geometric techniques) and to validate them with real-life deployments.

More recently, I have been interested in human-robot interaction: My students and I are studying the general problem of designing robot controllers so that robots can interact with humans in a seamless fashion.

Robotic Sensor Networks Lab

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