Note: This site used to be hosted at cs.rpi.edu; I have moved it here to preserve the contents.
Hello, I am a former graduate student in the Algorithmic Robotics
Laboratory (ARL) at RPI.
Huzzah. You may also be interested in my vast photo archives
or my del.icio.us. This site is mostly about my PhD research.
Currently I am Director of Integration Engineering at Internap. Internap recently
bought Voxel dot Net, where I've been responsible for architecture and development of a
variety of Internet infrastructure products. As of early 2012 I'm in NYC -- still building cool infrastructure products!
From 2008 until early 2012 I lived in lovely Singapore, where I spent a lot of time sweating
and enjoying S$2 chicken rice. For much of my time there, I lived
aboard my 40 ft sloop, Oia. Oia is currently laid up in Langkawi, Malaysia and undergoing
some minor refitting while I'm in New York.
In 2007 I co-founded a startup company in Cambridge, MA, SolidJoint Research, Inc.,
to develop a new green building material.
I was at RPI more or less from 1998 through 2007, aside from a
one year stint in the dot-com trenches. In 2003 I was awarded a BS
in Computer Science. In 2004 I finished my MS (thesis:
Topological mapping and map merging with sensing-limited
robots) under my advisor, Wesley H. Huang. In 2007
I finished my PhD (thesis: Mapping with limited sensing),
also advised by Wes Huang. The focus of my PhD research was robotic
mapping and exploration using small robots with limited sensing
capabilities.
I am also chronically interested in too many things. Among them:
current events, entrepreneurship, finance, foreign policy,
graduating, hiking, photography, politics, predictive markets,
probability, programming, proving things, puzzles, rationalism,
sensor networks, social software, teaching, travel, writing, and oh
so much more!
Publications
Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang. Fixed-lag sampling strategies for particle
filtering SLAM.
2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA 2007), pages 2433-2438, Rome, April 2007.
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Kristopher R. Beevers. Mapping with limited sensing. PhD thesis,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, January 2007.
Thesis web page (abstract, defense slides, software, etc.)
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Kristopher R. Beevers. Sampling strategies for particle filtering SLAM.
Technical Report 06-11, Dept. of Computer Science, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, September 2006.
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Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang. Inferring and
enforcing relative constraints in SLAM. 2006 Workshop on the
Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR 2006), New York, July 2006.
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Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang. SLAM with sparse sensing.
2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA 2006), pages 2285-2290, Orlando, May 2006.
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Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers. Topological map merging.
International Journal of Robotics Research, 24(8):601-613, August 2005.
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Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang. Loop closing in topological
maps. 2005 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2005), pages 4378-4383, Barcelona,
Spain, April 2005.
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Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers. Complete topological
mapping with sparse sensing. Technical Report 05-06, Dept. of Computer Science,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, March 2005.
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Kristopher R. Beevers and Jufeng Peng. A* graph search within the BGL
framework. In Boost Graph Library 1.33.0, October 2004.
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Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers. Topological mapping with
sensing-limited robots. In M. Erdmann et al., editors, Algorithmic Foundations of
Robotics VI, pages 235-250, Zeist, Springer, 2005.
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Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers. Topological map merging.
In R. Alami, R. Chatila, and H. Asama, editors, Distributed Autonomous Robotic
Systems 6, pages 97-106, Springer, 2007.
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Kristopher R. Beevers. Topological mapping and map merging with
sensing-limited robots. Master's thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, NY, April 2004.
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Projects
SLAM with limited sensing
The focus of my PhD thesis is on the development of simultaneous
localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms for robots with limited
sensing. (For example, our robots have an array of five
short-range infrared rangefinders.) In contrast, most SLAM
algorithms rely on the availability of frequent, high-resolution
feedback from sensors such as scanning laser rangefinders.
My research in this area investigates techniques for particle
filtering SLAM with low-resolution ("sparse") sensing, methods to
manage the high uncertainty associated with limited feedback,
improvements to particle filters for incorporating prior knowledge
and improving filter consistency, and implementation of SLAM on
real inexpensive robot hardware.
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Topological mapping with sensing-limited
robots
My Master's thesis work focused on the creation of topological
maps with robots possessing limited sensing capabilities, e.g.,
sparse, short-range sensing such as small arrays of infrared
rangefinders.
My research developed algorithms for exploring indoor
environments and representing the structure of an environment in a
graph, called a topological map. I have investigated issues in
map representation, loop-closing, and map merging in multi-robot
scenarios.
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mpro middleware
for the RWI MagellanPro
I have developed some libraries and programs, collectively called
mpro, for network-based control and
simulation of an RWI MagellanPro research robot. mpro provides a simple C/C++ interface that is
suitable for teaching applications. The software has been used by
students in CSCI-4190
Introduction to Robotic Algorithms.
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The drawableObject Library
I am the primary developer and maintainer of dolt, the drawableObject Library, a simple
representation-independent 2D C++ graphics library based on Glut
that can draw graphics to both the screen and Postscript. dolt is used in a number of ARL projects, and
has also been used as a tool for programming projects in several
classes.
dolt is tightly integrated with cgal, the
Computational Geometry Algorithms Library. dolt also provides its own geometric
representations, as well as several non-geometric primitives
including bitmapped images and text.
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Mobile robot development
In the summer of 2003, I worked with others in the ARL to develop
a new, capable mobile research robot platform. I designed and
implemented both low-level software (e.g. drivers and libraries)
and a high-level hybrid (reactive/deliberative) software
architecture.
Development of these robots is stalled for now as we work on
another, far simpler robot platform for use in our mapping
research. Still, we got quite a long way through the development
process, and some interesting media and documentation is
available.
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Robot motion planners
Back in 2002 I implemented a number of well-known robot motion
planners for planar robots with two and three degrees of freedom.
The planners include: uniform grid, quadtree, triangulation,
visibility graph, probabilistic roadmap, nonholonomic grid,
holonomic refinement and nonholonomic probabilistic roadmap
planners. Several of these motion planners have found their way
into ARL projects.
The code for the planners is not available publicly, but if you
are interested in using them, particularly for research
activities, feel free to contact me. For now, you can look at
images of the planners in action.
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Talks
In October 2006 I talked about "Mapping with limited sensing" at the
RPI Department of Computer Science Graduate Seminar.
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In September 2006 I talked about "Sampling strategies for RBPF SLAM" at
an ARL meeting.
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In July 2006 I talked about "Inferring and enforcing relative
constraints in SLAM" at the WAFR 2006 conference.
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In May 2006 I talked about "SLAM with sparse sensing" at the
ICRA 2006 conference.
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In January 2006 I talked about "Modern robot mapping" as part
of the "research qualifier" requirement for my PhD.
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In October 2005 I talked about "SLAM with sparse sensing" at an ARL
meeting.
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In April 2005 I talked about "Loop closing in topological maps" at the
ICRA 2005 conference.
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In March 2005 I talked about "Topological Map Merging" at an ARL
meeting.
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In February 2004 I talked about "Single-robot Topological Mapping
and Map Merging for Sensing-impaired Robots" at an ARL meeting.
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A few weeks later a slightly updated talk at a Center for Automation
Technologies seminar.
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In October 2003 I talked about "Mapping With Limited Sensing
Capabilities" at an ARL meeting.
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In July 2003 I talked about "Topological Map Merging for
Distributed Mapping" at an ARL meeting.
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In April 2003 I talked about "Software Considerations for Robots
in a Multi-robot System" at an ARL meeting.
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In Nov. 2002 I talked about "Game Theory, Robotics and the
Pursuit-Evasion Problem" at an ARL meeting.
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Teaching
Miscellany
Some other things that might interest you that I have put on this
page for no particular (good) reason:
Distributed system prototype
Just what it sounds like. A prototype for a distributed
computational system based on a plugin architecture. Written in C
for Linux/Win32. Comes with a simple prime number calculator
plugin; write your own plugins for increased functionality! Circa
2001.
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A puzzle!
(click here)
If you can figure out what this is, and its relation to "Madster" (formerly Aimster until
AOL pulled some strings), I owe you a cookie! By the way, I don't
like Aimster/Madster any more! Read Evan's page to find out
why. I was one of the four core members of the Aimster
development team for over a year, until I stopped getting paid.
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An insightful essay
(click here)
Here is a good essay by Orson Scott Card about programmers,
managers, etc. Circa 1995.
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