Dr. Arpan Kusari has joined UMTRI as an Assistant Research Scientist, a position where he will bring his cutting-edge industry experience. Dr. Kusari has spent five years at Ford Motor Company researching exclusively on making autonomous vehicles safe and viable, working collaboratively with researchers from MIT and University of Michigan to advance the state-of-the-art knowledge in autonomous vehicles. His research interest spans through the spheres of sensing and perception; and decision-making and control, in the domain of autonomous vehicles. In the sensing and perception realm, his interests lie in uncertainty quantification and fault tolerance of a generic sensor suite. Dr. Kusari is also interested in utilizing noise reduction methods for designing cost-effective low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) LiDARS. In decision making and control, he is focused on creating a robust framework capable of handling the uncertainty stemming from other road users’ behavior. In that regard, Dr. Kusari is pursuing development of methods for increasing the efficiency and robustness of probabilistic formalisms such as reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms to safely navigate the dynamic environment. His doctoral research was in LiDAR mapping in the areas of sensor calibration, precise estimation of earthquake displacement and uncertainty quantification in the point cloud.
