About Me
Tavie Kittredge (she/her) is a third year Computer Science and English double major at Davidson College in North Carolina. She plans to graduate in Spring 2024 and has previously done undergraduate research related to distributed computing.
About My Mentor
Nancy M. Amato is Head of the Computer Science Department and Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois in 2019, she was Unocal Professor and Regents Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and Senior Director of Engineering Honors Programs.
Amato received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, respectively. Her research focuses on motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel computing. She has graduated 24 PhD students, with most going to faculty positions (11) or research positions in government or industry (11). She is Vice President for Member Activities of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), was program chair for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. She was co-Chair of CRA-WP (2014-2017) and of the NCWIT Academic Alliance (2009-2011), is Chair-Elect of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication (T), is an elected Member and Vice Chair of the CRA Board of Directors and a member-at-large of the ACM Council.
Amato received the 2019 IEEE RAS Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation, the 2019 IROS Harashima Award for Innovative Technologies, the 2014 CRA Habermann Award, the inaugural NCWIT Harrold/Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award in 2014, the 2013 IEEE Hewlett-Packard/Harriet B. Rigas Award, and Texas A&M university-level awards in teaching (2011) and research (2018). She is a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.
About My Project
Tavie Kittredge is doing research relating to motion and task planning for robots at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Parasol Lab. She has worked on onboarding lessons, preparing the C++-based Parasol Motion Planning Library to be released as open-source, and expanding topologically guided motion planning to multiple robots. This topologically guided motion planning could potentially help many robots navigate in warehouse-like settings.