Professor Howie M. Choset

Howie M. Choset, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
 
Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Howie has created a comprehensive program in snake robots, which has led to basic research in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. These research topics are important because once the robot is built (design), it must decide where to go (path planning), determine how to get there (motion planning), and use feedback to close the loop (estimation). By pursuing the fundamentals, this research program has made contributions to coverage tasks, dynamic climbing, and mapping large spaces.
 
Already, Howie has directly applied this body of work to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue. He directs the Undergraduate Robotics Minor at Carnegie Mellon and teaches an overview course on Robotics which uses series of custom developed Lego Labs to complement the course work.
 
His students have won best paper awards at the RIA in 1999 and ICRA in 2003, he has been nominated for best papers at ICRA in 1997 and IROS in 2003 and 2007, won best paper at IEEE Bio Rob in 2006, and won best video at ICRA 2010. In 2002 the MIT Technology Review elected him as one of its top 100 innovators in the world under 35. In 2005, MIT Press published a textbook, lead authored by Choset, entitled Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations. Recently, he cofounded a company called Cardiorobotics which makes a small surgical snake robot for minimally invasive surgery.
 
Howie coedited Distributed Manipulation and Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics VIII: Selected Contributions of the Eighth International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, and coauthored Context Identification for Efficient Multiple-Model State Estimation, Relative Localization using Path Odometry Information, A Single-Step Maximum A Posteriori Update for Bearing-Only SLAM, and The Arc-Transversal Median Algorithm: A Geometric Approach to Increasing Ultrasonic Sensor Azimuth Accuracy. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Howie earned his B.S.Econ and B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. He earned his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1996.
 
Watch Modular Snake Robots and Slithering Snakebot. Visit his Facebook page. Read his LinkedIn profile.