Dr. Vandi Verma is interested in closed-loop decision-level control, including fault diagnosis, and recovery for robotic space and planetary exploration. She works in flight operations for the Mars Exploration Rovers. She is also working on the development of the Mars Science Laboratory flight mission. She earned her Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. Her research resulted in computationally efficient particle filter based methods for non-parametric state estimation, with a focus on fault detection and classification. Prior to joining JPL she was a Research Scientist in the Intelligent Systems division at NASA Ames Research Center. She led the team that designed the PLEXIL language for formally verifiable execution.

Current projects:
Mars Exploration Rover
Mars Science Laboratory

Previous projects:
Autonomy and Robotics, NASA Ames:
PLan Interchange Execution Language (PLEXIL), project lead
Autonomous site survey at Haughton crater
Desert RATS robotic EVA inspection
Autonomy for crewed operations
Carnegie Mellon University:
Life in Atacama
Sun-synchronous navigation
Icebraker Lunar Rover Initiat

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 decision-level control, including fault diagnosis and recovery
Reasoning under uncertainty
Robots for extreme environments
Aerial vehicles