Gregory Dudek

Gregory Dudek is a chaired professor of computer science at McGill University, was the Director of the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines from 2004 to 2007, and is the current Director of the McGill University School of Computer Science. The son of poet Louis Dudek, he was made a Dawson Scholar of that university (an honorary title) and directs the mobile robotics laboratory there. He was awarded a James McGill chair in 2008. According to his biography, he has written over 250 refereed articles on computer vision and robotics as of 2015, and is co-author (with Michael Jenkin) of the book Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics which is used to teach robotics at a number of universities.

His lab among the first in Canada to deal substantively and specifically with issues concerning mobile robotic systems. Prof. Dudek has an Erdős number of 3, having co-authored a paper with Sue Whitesides.

Research

His research deals with sensing for robots and has included theoretical work on the complexity of robot localization and the development of underwater and amphibious robots. He has worked on the use of topological maps and the complexity of topological mapping, an abstract idealized form of robotics problem. He has also looked at robot position estimation using photographic data, and the automated detection of interesting images.

With his colleagues he produced the first formal proof of the complexity of global robot locaization in a metric environment (i.e. how hard it is, in the worst possible case, for a robot to determine its position if it totally lost).

Gregory has a wide range of research interests that all have the common theme of robotics. He works students in the Mobile Robotics Lab (MRL) at McGill on many problems involving aspects of artificial perception, robot navigation, sample theory (e.g. applications of the secretary problem^[1] to robotics and recommender systems.

Education

Dudek obtained his B.Sc. in Physics and Computer Science and Queen's University and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Activities

Gregory's research interests often overlap with his personal life and allow him to travel to many interesting places. He and other students in the MRL lab take trips to run experiments on Aqua, an amphibious robot. Greg visited Mexico in 2009. Greg has also visited many other countries.

References

External links

• Gregory Dudek web site
• Localizing a robot with minimum travel (official link, but only abstract is free)
• Localizing a robot with minimum travel (free link)