Jean-Pierre de la Croix, Ph.D.
Robotics System Engineer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Robotics System Engineer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
I am a Robotics Systems Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I am a member of the Robotic Systems Estimation, Decision, and Control group in the Mobility and Robotic Systems section. At JPL, I continue to work on multi-agent robotics for new and challenging applications, including the robotic exploration of our universe.
I recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I worked in Dr. Magnus Egerstedt's Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems lab on multi-agent robotics.
My disseration focused on creating new control techniques for large-scale robotic systems (swarms!), such that humans can easily and effectively interact with these complex systems.
I grew up in a small town near Frankfurt am Main, Germany, but moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1997. In 2010, I graduated with two B.S. degrees in EE and CS from Georgia Tech with a focus on control theory, signal processing, artificial intelligence, and robotics!
I enjoy spending my free time writing software (see my GitHub page), prototyping hardware, and running as far as my legs will carry me.
25 August 2014Sharing Internet with a BeagleBone Black
23 August 2014Installing ROS Indigo Igloo on Gentoo Linux
Graduate Research
Despite the collective push towards greater autonomy in robots, most applications still require human intervention to guide autonomous robots in their tasks. Existing human-robot interfaces allow a human to intuitively interact with one or a few robots; however, as the number of robots involved in a task grows large, these interfaces become less effective or even unusable due to a lack of scalability for interacting with many robots at once.
Therefore, my dissertation focused on understanding large-scale human-robot (i.e., human-swarm) interactions and developing new techniques for collectively controlling large networks of robots with just a small number of simple inputs, rather than insisting that humans guide these robots invididually or in small groups.
Research Projects
I contributed to a number of research projects, which funded most of the work written about in my publications:
Journals
Book Chapters
Conference Proceedings