CS&E Profile: Volkan Isler

Robotics and Automation; Sensor Networks; Geometric Algorithms.

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)

About

Volkan Isler's primary research interests are in robotics, sensor-networks and geometric algorithms. He is a resident fellow at the Institute on Environment and holds the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. In 2008, he received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award (CAREER). He is currently co-chairing IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Networked Robots. He is also serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

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.

Here are some example problems:

• 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. In recent years, we have been focusing on environmental applications such as tracking invasive fish and using robots as data mules for harvesting sensor data.

I have also worked on problems in computer vision and human-robot interaction. Our lab wiki contains extensive information about our research:

Robotic Sensor Networks Lab