My work is focused on the development of robot systems, the mathematical and intelligent technologies that can be used within robot architectures and the development of new techniques - both hardware and software - that integrate human and robot within a single system.

Overall, my work can be broken down into three main areas: (i) automatic learning for robots, (ii) telerobotics and virtual reality, and (iii) mobile robotics research. I have published in a number of specialized conferences and symposia across these three research areas; one of my papers won a an award (Finalist (5 papers) for the Best Student Paper Competition).

A central notion of my work to date is the integral role that humans and robotic systems play together. For instance, in my paper "Human-Robot Collaborative Learning System for Inspection", my co-authors and I describe an approach to the process of reinforcement learning that involves a high degree of collaboration between the learning system and a human supervisor (typical reinforcement learning algorithms operate with much greater constrained interaction between system and user). The resulting evaluation demonstrates the benefits of the algorithm over more conventional reinforcement learning approaches.

Another paper "Virtual Reality Telerobotic System", also places humans and robots together at the center of system design. This paper sets out a design architecture for a system for humans to remotely operate a robotic system for physically manipulating suspicious-looking packages, bags, and luggage. Again, mathematical models are the core of the system, describing a transformational mapping between the virtual model and the physical environment in which the robot operates.

In other work, described in "An Expert System for Surveillance Picture Understanding", and in "Bag Classification Using Support Vector Machines", Prof. Stern and Prof. Edan and I, define mathematical approaches to the identification of key concepts from digital images. The results of both these papers make computational models of real-world entities, conditions, etc.

Recently I completed a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems and Robotics at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev under the supervision of Prof. Helman Stern and Prof. Yael Edan.

CV (pdf)

Email: kartoun@yahoo.com