Maxim Likhachev

Research Assistant Professor
Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania

I am a Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Science, which is part of School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania. I am also a member of the GRASP laboratory.

Research: My general research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. More specifically, they currently cover planning in deterministic and probabilistic domains and machine learning. So far, my research has been mainly motivated by the problem of fast and intelligent decision making by autonomous robotic systems in real-world environments. I do get easily motivated, however, by other interesting problems in AI.

During my 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at CMU, I worked with Tony Stentz on multi-agent planning with adversaries. During the same time, I have also worked on the design and implementation of a complex maneuvers planner for the CMU vehicle that won the Urban Challenge race (the third DARPA Grand Challenge). During my Ph.D. studies at CMU, my advisors were Geoff Gordon and Sebastian Thrun (presently at Stanford). Before enrolling into the Ph.D. program at CMU I have been a graduate student for two years in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech where I worked with Ronald Arkin at Mobile Robot Laboratory and Sven Koenig.

Tutorials, Workshops, etc.

• Tutorial "Real-Time Planning in Dynamic and Partially Known Domains" at IJCAI'09 and ICAPS'09 (co-organized with Sven Koenig). Slides (PDF).
• Workshop Bridging the Gap Between Task and Motion Planning at ICAPS'09 and AAAI'10 (co-organized with Conor McGann, Bhaskara Marthi, David E. Smith).

Teaching

• MEAM 620: Advanced Robotics class in Spring 2010.
• MEAM 620: Advanced Robotics class in Spring 2009.
• MEAM 620: Advanced Robotics class in Spring 2008.