Andrew Ladd

Academic Background

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Lydia Kavraki's Physical and Biological Computing Group. I received a B.S. in Joint Honors Mathematics and Computer Science from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 2000 and a M.S. in Computer Science from Rice University in 2003.

Research

Broadly, my research is about developing approaches for reasoning computationally about physical systems. I'm currently interested in algorithmic generation of motion for dynamical systems, particularly when the system of interest is not "nice" from a control theory perspective.

1. Motion Planning for Robots with Non-Trivial Dynamics.
2. Sampling-based Roadmap of Trees.
   • Check some videos where you can see paths computed by SRT for multiple rigid objects.These are non-smoothed paths for kinematic problems with many degrees of freedom.
3. Localization using the signal strength of Wireless Ethernet network packets.
   • Check an animation of localization results from the signal strength of wireless Ethernet.
4. Knot untangling using motion planning.
5. Simulated knot tying.

Selected Publications

My complete list of publications can be found at A.M. Ladd's publications.

• Ladd, A. M. and Kavraki, L. E. . Motion Planning in the Presence of Drift, Underactuation and Discrete System Changes. In Robotics: Science and Systems, MIT, Boston, MA, June 2005.
  Details     Download: [91.0kB pdf] 
• Plaku, E., Bekris, K. E., Chen, B. Y., Ladd, A. M. , and Kavraki, L. E.. Sampling-Based Roadmap of Trees for Parallel Motion Planning. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, pp. to appear, 2005.
  Details     Download: [1.5MB pdf] 
• Haeberlen, A., Flannery, E., Ladd, A. M. , Rudys, A., Wallach, D. S., and Kavraki, L. E.. Practical Robust Localization over Large-Scale 802.11 Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM 2004), pp. 70–84, Philadelphia, PA, Sept. 26 - Oct. 1 2004.
  Details     Download: [606.8kB pdf] 
• Ladd, A. M. and Kavraki, L. E.. Measure Theoretic Analysis of Probabilistic Path Planning. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 20(2):229–242, April 2004.
  Details     Download: [364.5kB pdf] 
• Ladd, A. M. and Kavraki, L. E.. Using Motion Planning for Knot Untangling. International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(7-8):797–808, 2004.
  Details     Download: [1.4MB pdf] 

Selected Awards

• Paper invited to ACM Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), 2005.
• Fellowship to pursue research at the Doctoral level from the Quebec government ( Fonds de recherche sur la nature et les technologies ) , $20000(CAN) per year for three years (Fall 2002 -- Summer 2005).
• International Conference on AI Planning Systems (ICAPS 2004). Invited to give a half-day tutorial session on Robot Motion Planning.
• Paper invited to International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2004.
• Paper invited to Eleventh International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR) , 2003.
• Rice University High Stipend Award on entry, Fall 2000.
• Fellowship to pursue research at the Master's level from the Quebec government ( Fonds de recherche sur la nature et les technologies ), $15000(CAN) per year for two years (Fall 2000 -- Summer 2002).
• National Science and Engineering Research Counsel of Canada Summer Undergraduate Research Award, $5000(CAN) for the summer, received separately in Summer 1999 and in Summer 2000.

Other Interests

• I enjoy playing bridge.
• I like music. I listen to live music in Houston and attend the occasional festival.
• I sometimes play games, lately its been Defense of the Ancients and Slash'Em.

Mailing address

Andrew M. Ladd
Rice University
Attn. Dept. of Computer Science
Mail Stop 132
Houston, TX 77005
USA

Contact info

office: Duncan Hall 3121
e-mail: aladd /AT/ cs.rice.edu
personal webpage: www.cs.rice.edu/~aladd
phone: 713-348-3889