Richard T. Vaughan Associate Professor School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University email vaughan [at] sfu.ca office TASC 8009 phone +1.778.782.5811 lab phone +1.778.782.6985 fax +1.778.782.3045 (Mailing address, etc.)

Research

Autonomous Robots, Multi-Robot Systems, Artificial Life, Robot Software and Simulation

I direct the Autonomy Laboratory which builds life-like machines. Our research goal is to increase the autonomy (i.e. freedom of action and energy management) of robots and other machines. My research has two main themes:

1. applying models of animal behavior to solve problems in robotics and other adaptive systems;
2. creating tools and techniques for programming, simulating and evaluating populations of robots.

Current Research Students

• PhD: Yaroslav Litus, Jens Wawerla, Mauricio Zuluaga (on leave @Google)
• MSc: Alex Couture-Beil, Pante a Jabbari, Abbas Sadat Kooch Mohtasham, Ash Charles

Graduated students...
Prospective students should read this before contacting me...

Associations

• SFU Autonomy Laboratory, Director
• SFU Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Associate Member
• The Player/Stage Project, Co-founder and maintainer
• Scientific Data Aquisition and Storage Research Lab (SDATS), Co-founder.
• The Free Software Foundation, Associate Member
• IEEE and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Member.

Previous positions and associations...

Education

• DPhil Computation, University of Oxford (1999)
• BA(Hons) Computing with Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex (1993)
• BTEC OND Musical Instrument Technology (Electronics), City of London Polytechnic (1990)