USNA Faculty Profiles: Joel Esposito

Joel M. Esposito
Associate Professor
Systems Engineering Department

105 Maryland Ave.
Annapolis, MD 21402
esposito at usna edu

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2002
M.S. University of Pennsylvania, 1999
B.S. Rutgers University, Magna Cum Laude 1997

Joel Esposito: is an Associate Professor in the System Engineering Department at the United States Naval Academy. He teaches courses in Robotics and Control Systems, and is the recipient of the 2009 USNA Rauoff Award for Excellence in Engineering Education. Pedagogically, his current efforts are focused on teaching courses in robotics and a new course on autonomous vehicles. His research focuses on the use of algorithmic and numerical tools for designing and analyzing mobile robot motion controllers. He is the author of over 45 peer reviewed publications. Prior to joining the faculty in 2002, he spent several years as a graduate research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania working with Vijay Kumar at the GRASP Laboratory. During those years he worked on a variety of DARPA projects, participated in the development of a programming language, CHARON, and held visiting appointments at Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories and Boston University.

Academic Genealogy: Ferdinand Freudenstein --> Bernie Roth --> Kenneth Waldron --> Vijay Kumar

About USNA: The Naval Academy is a 4 year undergraduate institution conferring the Bachelors of Science degree in a variety of accredited majors. Historically the Academy faculty has maintained a 50-50 civilian-officer ratio. Students receive tuition waivers in exchange to commit to serve as an officer in the Navy or Marine Corps for at least 5 years. The ABET Accredited Systems Engineering Major is the among the most popular majors at the Academy. It is actually an applied control systems department. At its core is a 5 course sequence in feedback control. Upper level electives include embedded computing, modern control, communication systems and four courses in robotics.

Looking for someone else? Perhaps you are looking from my wife's website? She is a Dentist in Annapolis and Arnold, Maryland

High Speed Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Surface Vessels: We are investigating real-time, high fidelity collision avoidance algorithms for marine vessels. The algorithms will account for uncertainty in the vehicle's mass and drag coefficients, and produce high confidence collision free trajectories. This project is funded by ONR.

Cooperative Manipulation: We study how large groups of robots can work together to move big objects in concert, without relying on a centralized leader. Army ants transporting prey provide a proof of concept in nature. Our ultimate goal is to field a team of autonomous tug boats that can tow disabled ships. Watch our video documentary or see our publications below for details. I work with Matthew Feemster at USNA. This project is funded by ONR.

Mobile Wireless Networks: Imagine a large swarm of mobile robots that have to exchange information to complete their task. Low power ad hoc wireless technologies such as BlueTooth and IR require that the sender and receiver are within a certain range of each other. In addition, signal strength improves if the sender and receiver maintain line of sight. These two constraints restrict how the entire group can move. VIDEO1, VIDEO2,

Rapidly Exploring Random Trees: This popular robot motion planning algorithm can be used to vet complex control systems as well, by trying to find scenarios under which control software will fail -- exposing the bugs in the code. One of the goals of the project is to adapt the original algorithm for this purpose, and to predict the convergence rate of the algorithm. Here is a video of the algorithm discovering how an intruder can get past a team of robot security guards.

Other Activities

Boosting Engineering Enrollment: I serve on two committees whose objective is to boost enrollment in technical majors at the Naval Academy. In an effort to inform potential students about what Systems Engineers do, I maintain this blog and facebook site

MTIC: I wrote (with Owen Barton and Josh Koehler) the Matlab Toolbox for the iRobot Create which allows you to control your Roomba or Create Robot from Matlab. We are now releasing Version 2.0 which has some bug fixes and adds the ability to drive the Create using a keyboard or GUI. The page also has some links to other useful Matlab code I have written.

MTIS: I wrote (with Carl Wick and Ken Knowles) the Matlab Toolbox for the Intelitek Scorbot which allows you to control Intelitek's ER-4 Scorbot from Matlab. We are now releasing the Beta version.

ASEE's Computers in Education Journal: I recently organized a Special Issue on Novel Approaches to Robotics Education. For the past 3 years I have served as the editor-in-chief of the Computers in Education Journal, a publication of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum to share new pedagogical approaches to using all facets of computing (programming, software, hardware, embedded, etc.) in engineering education. Please direct all submissions to ed-pub (at) crosslink (dot) net .

Professional Societies: I am part of the Secretary of Defense's working group on Unmanned Systems Education at the Service Academies. I am a member of the steering committee for NASA's Sample Return Centennial Challenge which will be hosted at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In the past I have also organized an invited session at ICRA 2008 on cooperative manipulation. I was an Associate Editor for IROS 2008.

Unmanned Ground Vehicle Competition: I am the faculty adviser for Robo-Goat: the Naval Academy's entry into the AUVSI's Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicle Student Competition. Our First year at the competition (2009) we won the Rookie of The Year Award! In 2010 an 2011 we placed 10th out of 50 teams.

University Service: . I am currently the Chair of the Division of Engineering's curriculum committee and leading an effort to revamp the Systems Engineering curriculum. I have also served on the Faculty Teaching and Service Award Committees, our departmental coordinator for Undergraduate Research.

Courses Taught:

ES486A: Autonomous Vehicles (Syllabus, Description, Labs, equipment)
ES450: Robotics, ES452 Advanced Topics in Robotics
ES451: Mobile Robot Design
ES308: Control Systems Laboratory

Pedagogical Articles:

B.Bishop, J.M.Esposito and J.Piepmeier, "Moving without wheels: educational experiments in robot locomotion", to appear in ASEE Computers in Education Journal, 2010
J.M. Esposito, M.G. Feemster, and J.M. Watkins, “Role of a Matlab real-time hardware interface within a systems modeling course”, Proceedings of the America Society of Engineering Education, June 2004
J.M. Esposito, S. Avramov, R. DeMoyer and S. Parikh, “Promoting and assessing intuitive understanding in a junior-level modeling course”, Proceedings of the America Society of Engineering Education, June 2005

updated spring 2009

Swarm Manipulation:

J.M. Esposito. "Decentralized cooperative manipulation with a swarm of mobile robots", to appear in IROS, 2009.
J.M. Esposito. "Distributed grasp synthesis for swarm manipulation", In IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 1489-1494, 2008.
M.G. Feemster, J.M. Esposito, and E.T. Smith. Cooperative manipulation on the water. In IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 1501-1506, 2008.
J.M. Esposito, E.T.Smith, M.G. Feemster, “Autonomous Tugboat Swarms”, Workshop on Swarming in Natural and Engineered Systems, Philadelphia, PA, May 2007
E.T. Smith, M.G. Feemster, and J.M. Esposito, “Swarm Manipulation of an Unactuated Surface Vessel”, IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, March 2007, P. 16-20
M.G. Feemster, J.M. Esposito and J. Nicholson, “Manipulation of large objects by swarms of autonomous marine vehicles: Part I -- Rotation”, Proceedings of the IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, p255-259, March 2006

Multi-Robot (Swarm) Motion Planning and Control:

J.M. Esposito and T.W. Dunbar, “Wireless constraints in swarm motion planning”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2006, p. 946-952 (SLIDES , VIDEO1, VIDEO2, from ICRA 2006)
J.M. Esposito, and M. Kim, “Using formal modeling with an automated analysis tool to design and parametrically analyze a multi-robot coordination protocol: a case study” , IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part A, Systems. Vol 37, Issue 3, May 2007 Page(s): 285-297
R. Alur, A. Das, J.M. Esposito, R. Fierro, Y. Hur, G. Grudic, V. Kumar, I. Lee, J. P. Ostrowski, G. J. Pappas, J. Southall, J. Spletzer, and C. Taylor “A framework and architecture for multi-robot coordination.”, International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 21, No.10-11, p. 977-995, Oct-Nov. 2002
R. Alur, T. Dang, J.M. Esposito, Y. Hur, F. Ivancic, V. Kumar, I. Lee, P. Mishra, G. J. Pappas, and O. Sokolsky, “Hierarchical modeling and analysis of embedded systems” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 91, No. 1, p.11-28, January 2003.
J.M. Esposito and V.Kumar, " A method for modifying closed-loop motion plans at runtime", International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Washington DC, 2002 Finalist for the Best Paper Award
J.M. Esposito and V. Kumar, “A tutorial on mobile robot programming, using a Hybrid Systems framework”, an invited paper for the Robot Programming Workshop, IEEE Intl. Conf. On Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2002), Washington, DC, May 2002
K. A. McIsaac, A. K. Das, J.M. Esposito, and James P. Ostrowski, “A hierarchical, modal approach to hybrid systems control of autonomous robots”, Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. On Intelligent Robots and Systems, p1020-1025, v.2, November 2000
J.M. Esposito and V. Kumar, “Closed loop motion plans for mobile robots”, Proceedings of the IEEE Intl. Conf. On Robotics and Automation, p2777-2782, v 3, May 2000

Enhancements to Rapidly Exploring Random Trees with applications to verification:

J.W. Kim, J.M. Esposito and V.Kumar, “RRT enhancements” International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol 15 Issue 12, p 1257-1272, Dec 2006

J. Kim, J.M. Esposito, and V. Kumar, "An RRT-Based Algorithm for Testing and Validating Multi-Robot Controllers" in Robotics: Science and Systems, Boston, MA, July 2005

J.M. Esposito and J. Kim, "Adaptive Sample Bias for Rapidly Exploring Random Trees with Application to Test Generation", American Control Conference, Portland, OR, June 2005.
J.M. Esposito, J. Kim, and V. Kumar "Adaptive RRT’s for Validating Hybrid Robotic Control Systems", Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Zeist, Netherlands, July 2004.
C. Belta, J.M. Esposito, J.Kim and V. Kumar, "Computational Techniques for Analysis of Genetic Network Dynamics", International Journal of Robotics Research: Special Invited Issue on Robotics Techniques Applied to Computational Biology, 24(2-3) p219, 2005

Numerical Methods for Simulating Hybrid Systems:

J.M. Esposito and V.Kumar, "A State Event Detection Algorithm for Numerically Simulating Hybrid Systems with Model Singularities", ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, Volume 17, Issue 1, p. 1-22, January 2007

J.M. Esposito and V.Kumar, "An Asynchronous Integration and Event Detection Algorithm for Simulating Multi-Agent Hybrid Systems", ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, Vol. 14, No. 4, Oct. 2004: 363-388.
J.M. Esposito, G. Pappas, and V. Kumar, “Accurate event detection for hybrid systems”, in Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC2001), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2034, Springer, March 2001 p. 204-217.
J.M. Esposito and V. Kumar, “Efficient dynamic simulation of robotic systems with hierarchy”, in IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation, , p. 2818-2823, v.3, May 2001.
J.M. Esposito, G. Pappas, and V. Kumar, “Multi-agent hybrid system simulation” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, p78-785, v.1, Dec 2001.

For a complete list see CV.