I am a PhD Candidate in the Computational Robotics Research Group. My advisor is Prof. Ron Alterovitz, and I get invaluable advice from Prof. Jan Prins.

My research focus is on applying cloud-computing and its readily available massive computing power to accelerating complex motion planning problems. This is particularly valuable in extending the lifespan and capabilities of power-constrained and mobile robots. I make use of high-performance computing techniques to accelerate motion planning on the cloud and in multicore CPUs onboard robots.

Contact

Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email:

Research

KD-Tree for SE(3) and SO(3)

Open Source Software

  • "Nigh"—concurrent exact nearest neighbor searching in C++17 (github)

    "Nigh" is a nearest neighbor searching data structure that supports highly concurrent inserts and queries. It supports Euclidean, SO(3), SO(3) and weighted combinations thereof.

  • Motion Planning Templates (MPT) (github)

    MPT is a C++ 17 header-only library for creating fast, parallel, robot-specific motion planners.

  • Math routines for Robotics in Java (github)

    This is a collection of math routines that are useful in the context of robotics in Java. They are highly performant, in many cases once the code is JIT compiled, it is able to match C++ performance. This library utilizes a reuse pattern that also helps minimize the impact of garbage collection.

  • ROS interface in Java (github)

    This Java-based implementation of the networking protocol in ROS allows Java programs to interact with robots using only software pulled from Maven repositories--setup is thus minimal, and it is thus quick to get started interfacing with robots.

  • Parallel RRT* in C (github)

    An implementation of Parallel RRT* (PRRT*) in C. It demonstrates how to concurrently update an RRT* graph from multiple threads running concurrently using lock-free atomic operations. Because of the low overhead of mutating shared memory structures, it typically demonstrate linear speedup with additional cores. In some cases, partitioning the sampling can lead to super-linear speedup. (See “Scalable Multicore Motion Planning Using Lock-Free Concurrency” in publications)

  • Parallel RRT* in Java (github)

    A Java implementation of PRRT*. See description on C version.

Publications

Robotics

  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ron Alterovitz “Motion Planning Templates: A Motion Planning Framework for Robots with Low-power CPUs,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) PDF Project GitHub
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ron Alterovitz “Concurrent Nearest-Neighbor Searching for Parallel Sampling-based Motion Planning in SO(3), SE(3), and Euclidean Topologies,” Proc. Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) December 2018
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Jan Prins, Ron Alterovitz “The Economic Case for Cloud-based Computation for Robot Motion Planning,” Proc. International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), December 2017 PDF
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Jan F. Prins, Ron Alterovitz “Cloud-based Motion Plan Computation for Power-Constrained Robots,” Proc. Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), December 2016 PDF
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ron Alterovitz, “Fast Nearest Neighbor Search in SE(3) for Sampling-Based Motion Planning,” Proc. Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), August 2014 Publisher PDF
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ron Alterovitz, “Scalable Multicore Motion Planning Using Lock-Free Concurrency,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2014 Publisher PDF
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, Jan F. Prins, and Ron Alterovitz, “Cache-Aware Asymptotically-Optimal Sampling-Based Motion Planning,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Jun. 2014, pp. 5804–5810 Publisher PDF
  • Jeffrey Ichnowski and Ron Alterovitz, “Parallel Sampling-Based Motion Planning with Superlinear Speedup,” in Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), Oct. 2012, pp. 1206–1212. Publisher PDF

Culling Dynamics

Patents

  • Jeffrey Ichnowski, “Streaming insertion of tokens into content to protect against CSRF”, US Patent 8,438,649, filed Apr 16, 2010, and issued May 7, 2013
  • James Wei-Ching Kao, Mark Hill, Jeffrey Ichnowski, and David Tze-Si Wu, “Database forms with attached audit history”, US Patent 6,070,177, filed Mar 6, 1998, and issued May 30, 2000
  • David Tze-Si Wu and Jeffrey Ichnowski, “Scripting language for distributed database programming”, US Patent 6,243,711, filed Mar 6, 1998, and issued Jun 5, 2001