Doctoral students win 2022 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for energy-efficient autonomous planning

Anthony Opipari, a PhD student in CSE, and Alphonsus Adu-Bredu, a PhD candidate in Robotics, have been selected as winners of the 2022 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their proposal, “Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Energy-Efficient Autonomous Planning.” The fellowship provides support for innovative student research “across a broad range of technical areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution, and teamwork.”

Advised by Robotics Prof. Chad Jenkins, Opipari and Adu-Bredu currently pursue research in application of planning and make connections between nondeterminstic computing, probabilistic inference, and perception for robotics.

“The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is an exceptional opportunity that will support the work Alphonsus and I are pursuing to discover efficient techniques for autonomous robotic planning,” said Opipari. “By increasing the energy-efficiency of these algorithms, we aim to substantially increase their applicability to power-constrained mobile robots. In addition to generous financial support, this fellowship will facilitate mentorship by and collaboration with engineers at Qualcomm. Alphonsus and I are excited and grateful to be recognized with this award.”

Opipari and Adu-Bredu are members of Jenkins’ Laboratory of Progress, which aims to discover new methods for computational reasoning and perception that will contribute to the technology of interactive robots and increase the usability of robotics in real-life situations through open-source and reproducible contributions to the field.