Dr.
Research Scientist
Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems,
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering,
MIT,
Room 5-207A,
Office Tel.: 617-324-1461
Email: arjunab@mit.edu or arjuna@ieee.org
RESEARCH
INTERESTS
I conduct research on mobile robotics. For the last 20 years I have been conducting research to develop unmanned, untethered, autonomous mobile undersea vehicle systems so that these vehicles could navigate and adapt to the changing environmental conditions and help us to explore these highly hostile environments. I have designed different types of underwater robots, developed multi-sensor based navigation/path planning algorithms so that these robots can localize and map the undersea environment. The aim of my research is to improve the on-board intelligence of these autonomously guided vehicles making them tether free and independent from external support. Therefore, I conduct research on embedded systems, sensors and sensor fusion schemes, data interpretation/association and tracking, software architecture design, actuator control systems to overcome some of the challenges introduced by these unstructured environments. I am a collaborator of the ONR funded PLUSNet (Persistent Littoral Undersea Surveillance Network) project, SWAMSI (Shallow Water Autonomous Mine Sensing Initiative) project and NSF funded ORION OOI (Ocean Observatories Initiative) program.