[    Home    |  
Personal    |    Research    |   Courses    |   Education    |   Resume    |   Contact    ]  


Research

Interests -  Computer Graphics, Geometric and Solid Modeling, Robotics, Visualization, Multimedia

Advisor - Dinesh Manocha

Research Group - GAMMA

Experience


Projects

Geometric Problems

My current research work covers a class of geometric problems: robot motion planning, Boolean operations, swept volume, and Minkowski sum computation.  These problems have a innumerable applications in robotics, computer graphics, and visualization.  My work has been published at a number of conferences and journals (see below).

Geometric modeling project webpage

Motion planning project webpage

Large Model Visualization

Earlier I had worked on a system for visualization of massive geometric models.  The main feature of our system was that it could render models much larger than the available physical memory.  It stored the entire model on disk and maintained only a small portion of the model in main memory using a novel data structure.  To improve performance, it performed smart memory management as well as use prefetching techniques. 

Walkthru project webpage

nanoManipulator

During my first year at graduate school, I worked as part of a nanoManipulator group, on a simulator for Atomic Force Microscope.  The purpose of the simulato was model verification.  It allowed scientists to propose different models for objects, compute a simulated scan using the simulator, and match the simulated scan with the experimental scan.  If the simulated scan matches the experimental scan, then the model is plausible; otherwise it is invalid. 

Nanomanipulator project webpage

Operating Systems

For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a small real time kernel for embedded systems.  The kernel supported basic features required to run real time vision applications such as collision detection, tracking, etc.


Publications

"Accurate Sampling-Based Algorithms for Surface Extraction and Motion Planning"
Gokul Varadhan
PhD Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005.
"Star-shaped Roadmaps - A Deterministic Sampling Approach for Complete Motion Planning"
Gokul Varadhan, Dinesh Manocha,
Robotics: Science & Systems 2005
"Accurate Minkowski Sum Approximation of Polyhedral Models "     Awarded the Best Paper Award
Gokul Varadhan, Dinesh Manocha,
Pacific Graphics, 2004
"Topology Preserving Surface Extraction Using Adaptive Subdivision"
Gokul Varadhan, Shankar Krishnan, T.V.N Sriram, Dinesh Manocha,
Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing, 2004
"A Simple Algorithm for Complete Motion Planning of Translating Polyhedral Robots "
Gokul Varadhan, Shankar Krishnan, T.V.N Sriram, Dinesh Manocha,
Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, 2004

An extended version of this paper will appear in the International Journal of Robotics Research.

"Fast Swept Volume Approximation of Complex Polyhedral Models"     Awarded the Best Paper Award
Young J. Kim, Gokul Varadhan, Ming C. Lin and Dinesh Manocha,
ACM Conference on Solid Modeling & Applications 2003

An extended version of this paper appeared in the Journal of Computer Aided Geometric Design.

"Feature-Sensitive Subdivision and Iso-Surface Reconstruction "
Gokul Varadhan, Shankar Krishnan, Young J. Kim, Dinesh Manocha,
IEEE Visualization, 2003
"Efficient Max-Norm Distance Computation and Reliable Voxelization"
Gokul Varadhan, Shankar Krishnan, Young J. Kim, Suhas Diggavi, Dinesh Manocha,
Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing, 2003
"Out-of-Core Rendering of Massive Geometric Environments"
                    Gokul Varadhan, Dinesh Manocha
                    IEEE Visualization, 2002
 
"Fast Simulation of Atomic-Force-Microscope Imaging of Atomic and Polygonal Surfaces Using Graphics Hardware."
Gokul Varadhan, Warren Robinett, Dorothy Erie and Russell M. Taylor II
Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis, 2002

Collaborators

All of my research work has been done jointly with one or more of the following collaborators:

Dinesh Manocha (Advisor)
Shankar Krishnan (AT&T Labs)
Young J Kim (EWHA University)
Brian Guenter (Microsoft Research)
Ming Lin
TVN. Sriram
Russell Taylor
Dorothy Erie  (Chemistry)
Warren Robinett
Vivek Haldar (UC Irvine)
Subashis Banerjee (IIT Delhi)
M. Balakrishnan (IIT Delhi)