research

I work on problems involving motion coordination of multiple mobile vehicles to achieve specified tasks. Since 2005, I have looked at Pursuit-evasion games that involve one or many pursuers seeking to capture or get close to an evader. I consider constraints such as sensing limitations and non-holonomic motions for the players. The inspiration for some of my strategies are predator behaviours in ecology and potential applications are surveillance and search-and-rescue, where the person to be rescued can be thought of as the evader.

Recently, I have been working on related problems in the area of dynamic vehicle routing. These are problems that involve designing strategies for a service vehicle to efficiently serve demands that continuously arrive in some region. These problems could be considered to be in the class of pursuit-evasion games with multiple evaders, wherein the service vehicle is the pursuer and the demands are the evaders.

The following is a list of my publications:

Journal Articles

3. S. D. Bopardikar, S. L. Smith, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. Dynamic vehicle routing for translating demands: Stability analysis and receding-horizon policies, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2009. Note: To appear (Submitted March 2009) [PDF]

2. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. A cooperative Homicidal Chauffeur game. Automatica, 45(7): 1771-1777, 2009.[PDF]

1. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. On Discrete-Time Pursuit-evasion Games with Sensing Limitations. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 24(6): 1429-1439, 2008. [PDF]

Conference Articles

8. S. D. Bopardikar, S. L. Smith, and F. Bullo. Vehicle Placement to Intercept Moving Targets. In American Control Conference, Baltimore, MD, USA. June 2010. Note: Submitted.

7. S. L. Smith, S. D. Bopardikar, and F. Bullo. A Dynamic Boundary Guarding problem with Translating Targets. In IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Shanghai, China, December 2009. Note: To appear.

6. S. L. Smith, S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. Dynamic Vehicle Routing with Moving Demands - Part II: High speed Demands or Low Arrival Rates. In proceedings of the 2009 American Control Conference, St. Louis, MO, USA. [PDF]

5. S. D. Bopardikar, S. L. Smith, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. Dynamic Vehicle Routing with Moving Demands - Part I: Low speed Demands and High Arrival Rates. In proceedings of the 2009 American Control Conference, St. Louis, MO, USA. [PDF]

4. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. A pursuit game with range-only measurements. In proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Cancun, Mexico. [PDF]

3. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. A cooperative Homicidal Chauffeur game. In proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, New Orleans, LA, USA. [PDF]

2. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. Cooperative pursuit with sensing limitations. In proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference, New York City, NY, USA. [PDF]

1. S. D. Bopardikar, F. Bullo, and J. P. Hespanha. Sensing limitations in the Lion and Man problem. In proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference, New York City, NY, USA. [PDF]

Research at IIT Bombay

With Prof. B. Seth, I had worked on the design of an artificial above-knee prosthetic device. There were two aspects - a novel design and prototype that incorporated certain key natural gait features that were missing in contemporary devices, and a passive control system to match the gait dynamics.

Conference Article

1. S. D. Bopardikar and B. Seth. Design of an artificial leg mechanism for above-knee amputees. In proceedings of the 12^th National Conference on Machines and Mechanisms, 16-17 December, 2005, Guwahati, India, Pages 350-356. [Extended Abstract]