Postdoctoral Fellow
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
33 Oxford St MD 238
Cambridge, MA 02138
email: kar.at.eecs.harvard.edu
twitter: @dkkarthik

What's New:

• Apr '12: Our paper on Simbeeotic was the Runner-up for Best Paper award in the SPOTS track at IPSN-SPOTS 2012.
• Apr '12: Our demo on tracking a helicopter using a Kinect sensor through Simbeeotic won the Best Demo award at IPSN-SPOTS 2012.
• Dec '11: Appointed publications chair for Sensys 2012

My research interests broadly span robotics, sensor networks, embedded systems, and mobile computing. I am currently working on the RoboBees project which is a 5-year NSF Expeditions in Computing grant to create swarms of robotic bees. My particular interests are in programming and coordination of such swarms.

Karma: Karma is a framework to program and coordinate micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) swarms. Karma proposes a programming model where the application can be specified as a set of behaviors. Each behavior produces and consumes information on execution. The control flow is specified as dependencies on the presence of such information. Karma also divides the world where the application is being executed into Regions. This division converts the problem of coordination among the MAVs into a scheduling problem of assigning MAVs to execute individual behaviors in regions. MAVs have limited flight time due to a limited battery and need to return to a central location (called Hive) to recharge. Each such round trip is called a Sortie and is used as an atomic unit of work in the system. The Karma scheduler repeatedly applies such atomic units of work by scheduling MAVs to behavior-region pairs thereby working towards application completion.

Here is a video (1080p version) of Karma in action.

1. "A Comparison of Deterministic and Stochastic Approaches to Allocating Spatially Dependent Tasks in Micro-Aerial Vehicle Swarms",
   Karthik Dantu, Spring Berman, Bryan Kate, Radhika Nagpal
   (Under Submission 2012)
   
2. "Simbeeotic: A Simulator and Testbed for Micro-Aerial Vehicle Swarm Experiments",
   Bryan Kate, Jason Waterman, Karthik Dantu, Matt Welsh
   In IPSN '12: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (SPOTS Track), Beijing, China, Apr. 16-19, 2012.
   [tl;dr] [Slides] [Source] [bib] [ACM]
   Runner-up for Best Paper Award (SPOTS Track)
   Best Demo Award (IPSN-SPOTS 2012)
3. "Programming Micro-Aerial Swarms with Karma",
   Karthik Dantu, Bryan Kate, Jason Waterman, Peter Bailis, Matt Welsh
   In SenSys '11: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Seattle, Washington, Nov. 1-4, 2011.
   [tl;dr] [Slides (250 M)] [Video] [bib] [ACM]
   

• 2012: Sensys (Pub chair), Sensornets (PC)