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

I am currently on the job market. Please find my academic application materials here

What's New:

• Mar '13: A RoboBees article in Scientific American talks about Karma and Simbeeotic, and can be seen here if you have access.
• Feb '13: Video on RoboBees in technewsdaily shows Simbeeotic.
• Dec '12: Invited to serve on the program committee of 4th International Conference on Sensor Systems and Software .
• Dec '12: Mike Bechard, a rising junior from East Nazarene College worked with me this summer on understanding impact of mobility on signal strength in low power wireless networks. His work was recently highlighted by his school in this video.
• Nov '12: Invited talk at the annual meeting of American Society of Gravitational and Space Science Research on 'Challenges in Building Robotic Bee Swarms'
• Nov '12: Upcoming talks at UT-Austin, University of North Texas, and UT-Arlington
• Aug '12: Two of the summer REU projects were accepted to TinyTOCS Vol. 1.
• July '12: Paper on Comparison of stochastic and deterministic task allocation strategies accepted to IROS 2012.
• June '12: Invited to be in the PC of 2nd International Conference on Sensor Networks.
• May '12: Invited talk in Biomimetics session at 10th International Mine Warfare Technology Symposium, Monterey, CA.
• 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.

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.

Coordination In Micro-Aerial Vehicle Swarms [IROS 12] [SenSys 11] [IPSN 12]

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 allows users to build complex applications from simple behaviors. Our target tracking application is only 50 lines of code.

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

Simbeeotic: Simbeeotic is an event-driven simulator written in Java to simulate Micro-Aerial Vehicle swarms. It is built on JBullet, a 6 degree-of-freedom physics engine. One can implement control behaviors, attach virtual sensors, and simulate virtual worlds. It is easy to quickly simulate swarm behavior, design custom control algorithms, network behavior, and run repeated simulations. Simbeeotic is open-source and available on github.

Mobile Networking [ROBOCOMM 09] [ICRA 09] [WCNC 03] [ISLPED 02]

Most wireless routing protocols are designed for static wireless nodes. They are designed to find the "best" routes for data, where best is usually defined as the most reliable (based on link quality) or one that takes the least amount of time. In mobile networks, the link quality between nodes changes constantly as nodes are mobile. In robot networks, the nodes themselves have an idea of where they are headed. This information could be passed to the routing protocol to improve the stability of routes in such networks. We demonstrate that by incorporating positional and directional cues, route stability improves by as much as 20% in Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), a representative mesh routing protocol.

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
   In IROS '12: Accepted for publication to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
   [tl;dr] [Slides] [bib]
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)]  [Youtube]  [1080P]  [bib]  [ACM]
   

• 2013: Sensornets (PC), S-CUBED (PC)
• 2012: Sensys (Pub chair), Sensornets (PC)

• Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), Transacations on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (frequently)
• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (occasionally)

• Robotics: Science and Systems 2013 (RSS 2013), IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (Emnets), IEEE/ACM International conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), IEEE International Conference for Design Automation in Europe (DATE), IEEE International Design Automation Conference (DAC), IEEE Conference on Sensors, Mesh, and Adhoc Networking and Communications (SECON), IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).