Vandi Verma Tompkins is interested in the development of closed-loop control software, including fault diagnosis and recovery, for robotic space exploration. She is a rover driver for the Mars Exploration Rovers, which includes mobility and robotic arm operation on Mars. She is working on the development of the Mars Science Laboratory flight mission and will be a rover driver for the Curiosity rover on successful landing. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Robotics in 2005. Her research resulted in computationally efficient particle filter based methods for non-parametric state estimation, with a focus on robot fault detection and classification. Prior to joining JPL she was a research scientist in the Intelligent Systems division at NASA Ames Research Center.

Technical Program Committee Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, June 2009.

Technical Program Committee Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), July 2009.

Closed-loop control software, including fault diagnosis and recovery
Reasoning under uncertainty
Robots for extreme environments
Aerial vehicles