Abhishek Tiwari Former graduate student Department of Electrical Engineering California Institute of Technology Currently working as Senior Research and Development Scientist at UtopiaCompression Corporation, Los Angeles, CA.

I thank the Department of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech for letting me maintain this webpage!!

Education and past research

• BTech Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, 2001.
• MS Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA 2003. 
• PhD, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, June 2007.
• Worked at the Center for Robotics, IIT Kanpur to develop a 'Robot Soccer' team. Represented IIT Kanpur in the FIRA MIROSOT championships held in Singapore in May'2000. Visit the Robot Soccer web page @ IIT Kanpur.
• Summer Intern at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Department of Micro technique, EPF Lausanne, Switzerland in June-July'2000. I worked with the cute little robot "ALICE" developed at ASL. I developed reactive rule based collaborative strategies for 6 ALICEs playing soccer on a field of size same as an A4 sheet. Visit the ALICE Soccer Page for some cool pictures and mpegs of ALICEs performing under rule based strategies.
• Autonomous Navigation of a Lego robot using optical flow techniques in IIT Kanpur. click here for details.
• From July 2001 - September 2001, I worked with the Collective Robotics group at Caltech, on an infrared sensor belt for the Moorebot.
• Developed a PWM based motor controller and a serial port and USB interface for the Kelly vehicles under the Multi Vehicle Wireless Testbed Project. 

As an under graduate student I trained as an electrical engineer and a roboticist always trying to build new things that work. I was a true engineer, with the first and foremost objective to somehow make it work often at the expense of not understanding underlying theory. As a graduate student at Caltech, one of the most theoretical school in the US, my perspective changed, I was influenced by mathematicians and applied mathematicians. I realized the importance and beauty of theoretical results. Now as an active researcher in industry I get to develop theory and make things work at the same time. I am always interested in collaborating with anyone with interesting ideas, please send me an email.

I am interested in a wide variety of areas including Autonomous Systems, Wireless Ad-hoc Networks, Robotics, Convex and Combinatorial Optimization, Spatio-temporal planning, multi-agent rendezvous, dynamic sensor coverage, networked control systems, graph theory, automated air traffic control, localization in GPS denied environments, passive range detection using monocular video.

Currently at UtopiaCompression Corporation I am leading efforts to research and develop Mobility Aware Routing and Mission Planning Toolbox for the Airborne Network of the future. The Airborne Network will play a crucial role in distributed air traffic control and for providing wireless internet coverage over a wide urban area. I have recently been granted another phase I SBIR to develop topology control solutions for the airborne network. We update our activities on our Intelligent Networking webpage.

I have been a Co-PI for Obstacle Avoidance and Path-Planning for Exploratory Unmanned Surface Vehicles. We have developed an Adaptive 2-D Sampling and Optimal Obstacle free Path-planning system for exploration missions by a team of autonomous vehicles.

Prior to joining UC Corp., I worked with Professor Richard M. Murray on the following areas for my PhD at Caltech:

Rendezvous problem is one of cooperative control, where it is required to design control laws under which multiple agents can be made to arrive at a common location at the same time. The problem and its variants finds applications in Spacecraft Docking, Cooperative Strike, Autonomous Formation Flight, Ballistic Missile Interception.

Dynamic Sensor Coverage problem falls under the category of Situational Awareness. The problem is to deploy a "few", "limited range", "mobile" sensors in a time varying uncertain environment so as to maintain appreciable estimates of the states of the environment at all time. Applications are Weather Monitoring, Automatic Surveillance, Reconnaissance, Sensor Networks.

Following is the list of important publications

Towards a Mission Planning Toolbox for the Airborne Network: Optimizing Ground Coverage under Connectivity Constraints.
A. Tiwari, A. Ganguli and A. Sampath.
Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference 2008.

Probabilistic Performance of State Estimation Across a Lossy Network

M. Epstein, L. Shi, A. Tiwari and R. M. Murray

Automatica 2008, (To Appear)

Constructing Optimal Cyclic Tours for Planar Exploration and Obstacle Avoidance: A Graph Theory Approach.

A. Tiwari, H. Chandra, J. Yadegar and J. Wang.

Advances in Cooperative Control and Optimization, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences,

Springer 2007.

Dynamic Sensor Coverage with Uncertainty Feedback: Analysis Using Iterated Maps.

A. Tiwari and R. M. Murray

Proceedings of the American Control Conference, 2006.

Estimation with Information Loss: Asymptotic Analysis and Error Bounds
L. Shi, M. Epstein, A. Tiwari, R.M. Murray
To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2005.

Estimation of Linear Stochastic Systems over a Queuing Network
M. Epstein, A. Tiwari, L. Shi, R. M. Murray
To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference of Sensor Networks (SENET), 2005.

Analysis of Dynamic Sensor Coverage Problem using Kalman Filters for Estimation.
A. Tiwari, M. Jun, D. E. Jeffcoat, R. M. Murray
 Proceedings of the 16th IFAC World Congress, 2005

Polyhedral Cone Invariance Applied to Rendezvous of Multiple Agents.
A. Tiwari, J. Fung, R. Bhattacharya, R. M. Murray.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2004.

Ellipsoidal Cone and Rendezvous of Multiple Agents.
R. Bhattacharya, J. Fung, A. Tiwari, R. M. Murray.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2004.

A Framework for  Lyapunov Certificates  for Multi-Vehicle  Rendezvous  Problems.
A. Tiwari, J. Fung, J. M. Carson, R. Bhattacharya, R. M. Murray.
Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC). 2004.

PhD Thesis Advisor: Professor Richard M. Murray

Awards, Grants and honors

• Phase I SBIR award from United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on "Topology Control for the Airborne Network"
• Phase II SBIR award from AFRL on "Routing within an Airborne Network".
• Prize for Academic Excellence from the senate of IIT Kanpur.
• Killgore Fellowship award from Caltech.

Curriculum Vitae

Contact Information

Abhishek Tiwari
       11150 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 1020, 
       Los Angeles, CA - 90066

Email : atiwari79 AT gmail DOT com