Howie Choset
Kavcic-Moura Professor of Computer Science, Robotics Institute
Co-Director, Biorobotics Lab
Courtesy Appointment, Biomedical Engineering
Courtesy Appointment, Mechanical Engineering
- 3205 Newell-Simon Hall
5000 Forbes Avenue
Robotics Institute
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University where he serves as the co-director of the Biorobotics Lab and as director of the Robotics Major. He received his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Business from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Choset received his Masters and PhD from Caltech in 1991 and 1996.
Choset's research group reduces complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning. Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Choset has created a comprehensive program in modular, high DOF, and multi-robot systems, which has led to basic research in mechanism design, path planning, motion planning, and estimation. This work has been supported by both industry and government; DOD support includes two MURIs, one of which Choset was the CO-PI, a young investigator award, and multi-PI awards for modular systems. Choset's group has produced over 60 journal papers (including 2 in Science and one in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sceince), 180 conference papers and 15 patents.
Choset's work has also been recognized by several best paper awards and nominations at ICRA, IROS and other robotics meetings. Choset's research program has made contributions to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and search and rescue. In addition to publications, this work has led to Choset, along with his students, to form several companies including Medrobotics, for surgical systems, Hebi Robotics, for modular robots, and Bito Robotics for autonomous guided vehicles.
Recently, Choset's surgical snake robot cleared the FDA and has been in use in the US and Europe since. Choset also leads multi-PI projects centered on manufacturing: (1) automating the programming of robots for auto-body painting; (2) the development of mobile manipulators for agile and flexible fixture-free manufacturing of large structures in aerospace, and (3) the creation of a data-robot ecosystem for rapid manufacturing in the commercial electronics industry. Choset co-lead the formation of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, which is $250MM national institute advancing both technology development and education for robotics in manufacturing. Finally, Choset is a founding Editor of the journal .Science Robotics. and is currently serving on the editorial board of IJRR.
In 2002 the MIT Technology Review elected Choset as one of its top 100 innovators in the world under 35. In 2014, Popular Science selected Choset's medical robotics work as the Best of What's New in Health Care. In 2005, MIT Press published a textbook, lead authored by Choset, entitled "Principles of Robot Motion." Finally, Choset's students have won best paper awards at the RIA in 1999 and ICRA in 2003; his group's work has been nominated for best papers at ICRA in 1997, IROS in 2003, 2007, and 2011, and CLAWAR in 2012; won best paper at IEEE Bio Rob in 2006, SSRR 2012 and 2015; won best video at ISMICS 2006 and ICRA 2011; and was nominated for best video in ICRA 2012.
Education
- B.S.Eng. in Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania (Moore), 1990
- B.S.Econ in Entrepreneurial Management, University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), 1990
- M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Caltech, 1991
- Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Caltech, 1996
Research
Choset's group reduces complicated high-dimensional problems found in robotics to low-dimensional simpler ones for design, analysis, and planning. Choset has created a comprehensive program in modular, high DOF, and multi- robot systems, which has led to contributions to challenging and strategically significant problems in diverse areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection, and rescue.Publications
2020
- Simultaneous Policy and Discrete Communication Learning for Multi-Agent Cooperation
Benjamin Freed, Guillaume Sartoretti and Howie Choset
Journal Article, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 2498 - 2505, April, 2020 - Locomotion of a multi-link non-holonomic snake robot with passive joints
Tony Dear, Blake Buchanan, Rodrigo Abrajan-Guerrero, Scott David Kelly, Matthew Travers and Howie Choset
Journal Article, The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 598 - 616, April, 2020 - Directional Compliance in Snake Robot Obstacle-Aided Locomotion
Tianyu Wang, Julian Whitman, Matthew Travers and Howie Choset
Journal Article, Bulletin of the American Physical Society, APS March Meeting 2020, Vol. 65, No. 1, March, 2020
2019
- Registration with a small number of sparse measurements
Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Nicolas Zevallos, Prasad Vagdargi and Howie Choset
Journal Article, International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 38, No. 12, pp. 1403 - 1419, October, 2019 - Distributed Learning of Decentralized Control Policies for Articulated Mobile Robots
Guillaume Sartoretti, William Paivine, Yunfei Shi, Yue Wu and Howie Choset
Journal Article, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 1109 - 1122, October, 2019 - Robotics Enabled Autonomous and Closed Loop Trauma Care In A Rucksack – TRACIR
R. Poropatich, M. R. Pinsky, G. Clermont, F. Guyette, D. Salcido, L. Weiss, A. Dubrawski, H. Choset, C. Atkeson, H. Herman and W. Fink
Conference Paper, Proceedings of Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS), August, 2019 - A-MHA*: Anytime Multi-Heuristic A
Ramkumar Natarajan, Muhammad Suhail Saleem, Sandip Aine, Maxim Likhachev and Howie Choset
Conference Paper, Proceedings of Twelfth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2019), July, 2019 - PRIMAL: Pathfinding via Reinforcement and Imitation Multi-Agent Learning
Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti, Justin Kerr, Yunfei Shi, Glenn Wagner, T. K. Satish Kumar, Sven Koenig and Howie Choset
Journal Article, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 2378 - 2385, July, 2019 - Motion Planning, Design Optimization and Fabrication of Ferromagnetic Swimmers
Jaskaran Grover, Daniel Vedova, Nalini Jain, Matthew Travers and Howie Choset
Conference Paper, Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, June, 2019 - Hand-held stiffness measurement device for tissue analysis
Tejas Zodage, Arkadeep Narayan Chaudhury, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Nicolas Zevallos and Howie Choset
Conference Paper, In the proceedings of the Hamlyn symposium on Medical Robotics, June, 2019