Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Volkan Isler is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Minnesota. He is a 2009-2012 resident fellow at the Institute on Environment and 2010-2012 McKnight Land-Grant Professor. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a post-doctoral researcher at CITRIS at UC Berkeley. He obtained his MSE (2000) and PhD (2004) degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he was a member of the GRASP Lab and the Theory Group. He obtained his BS degree (1999) in Computer Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. In 2008, he received the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award (CAREER). From 2009 to 2015, he chaired IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation’s Technical Committee on Networked Robots. He also served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. His research interests are primarily in robotics, computer vision, sensor networks and geometric algorithms, and their applications in agriculture and environmental monitoring.

Abstract: Mobile robots equipped with various sensors can gather data at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales and resolution. Over the years, our group has developed autonomous surface, ground and aerial vehicles for finding and localizing radio tagged animals. Recently, we’ve also developed robotic systems for yield estimation and farm monitoring. I will give an overview of these projects as well as some of the fundamental algorithmic problems we studied along the way.