E. Gil Jones

Dr. E. Gil Jones is a Research Engineer at Willow Garage focusing on arm navigation and software systems integration.  He and Dr. Sachin Chitta are the Willow Garage maintainers of the arm navigation stacks, which allow robot arms to move safely in cluttered environments with an emphasis on arm movement for grasping and manipulation.  He is especially interested in the interface between arm planning and perception, including constructing the collision environment in which the planners operate and perceiving and planning into and out of contact.  He also spends his time writing overly complicated joystick controllers and testing and debugging robot software pipelines.

Gil earned a B.A. in Computer Science from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA and worked for 2 years for Bluefin Robotics, maker of autonomous underwater vehicles, in Cambridge, MA.  He did his Ph.D. work at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.  At CMU he worked with advisors Bernardine Dias and Tony Stentz in the rCommerce lab on market-based multi-robot coordination.  His dissertation, "Multi-robot Coordination in Domains with Intra-path Constraints" focused on task allocation, scheduling, and coordination of multi-robot teams in domains where constraints affect path planning.