Monday 3 to 4 PM, 112 McLaughlin and
Wednesday 11 AM to 12 PM, 112 McLaughlin Hall
By appointment
Raja Sengupta is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Sengupta’s research focuses on automated cars, drones, connected cars, smartphone apps for economics & transportation, wireless networking, and control theory. He likes to do research on the industry and get it into the marketplace, and he holds car-to-road networking patents with Toyota, a UAV patent with BAE Aerospace, and car-to-car networking contributions standardized by the SAE into J2945. Sengupta has been an advisor to the World Bank, is a recipient of the USDOT’s Connected Vehicle Technology award in 2011, the UC Berkeley Energy and Climate Lectures Innovation award in 2014, and has authored over a hundred papers spanning control theory, networking, drones, and transportation.
Ph.D., Systems Engineering, EECS Department, University of Michigan, 1995
M.S., Systems Engineering, EECS Department, University of Michigan, 1991
B.S., Electrical Engineering, Jadavpur University, India, 1988
Sengupta’s research focuses on transportation, wireless communications, and inertial navigation for vehicle systems. Here are a few of the research projects he is currently working on below:
- Sensor networks for forest fire monitoring: The objective of this project is to distribute small sensors in the wild that detect the onset of fires through measurements of temperature, pressure, or humidity. Sengupta is working on the sensor positioning and localization aspect.
- Neighborhood Mapping: Vehicle Neighborhood Map, developed in the University of California PATH, is an in-vehicle sensing and communication system which allows a vehicle to learn its neighborhood. Vehicles exchange their location information among themselves over the 802.11a wireless network in Ad-hoc mode. In-Vehicle safety applications (e.g., gap assistance, forward collision warnings) can base on this information to assist drivers in potential conflicts. Each vehicle is equipped with a GPS receiver and 802.11a wireless radio, and our software system. The software system consists of a GPS Broadcaster and a Neighborhood Map Builder. GPS Broadcaster broadcasts the vehicle’s position onto the 802.11a wireless network when it receives a new measurement from the GPS receiver. Neighborhood Map Builder listens to the wireless channel and uses the Geo-cast protocol to filter out any messages which are outside of its neighborhood. Higher-layer applications take these messages and transform them into the vehicle’s body-fixed coordinate frame. After the information is processed, the in-vehicle display delivers it to the user.
- Vision-Based Navigation: Sengupta’s fundamental research thrust is to make unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) capable of self-directed, collaborative navigation. We work toward a world where teams of unmanned vehicles will make possible what once was not. Whether aiding in firefighting, border patrol, search and rescue, convoy protection, remote environmental monitoring, or traffic radio reports, many aspects of commercial and structural life will be enhanced by the incorporation of autonomous collaborative vehicles.
Recent Publications
Journal Papers
• Rathinam, S. , Z. W. Kim and R. Sengupta, "Vision-Based Monitoring of Locally Linear Structures Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle," Journal of Infrastructure Systems, March 2008, Vol. 14, No. 1.
• Rezaei, S. and R. Sengupta, "Kalman Filter-Based on Integration of DGPS and Vehicle Sensors for Localization," IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, November 2007, Vol. 15, No. 6, pp. 1080-1088.
• Shladover, S. E., G. Polatkan, R. Sengupta, J. VanderWerf, M. Ergen and B. Bougler, "Dependence of Cooperative Vehicle System Performance on Market Penetration," Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board No. 2000, November 2007, doi: 10.3141/2000-15.
• Rathinam, S. and R. Sengupta, "Algorithms for Routing Problems Involving UAV's. In Innovations in Intelligent Machines-1," Springer Series on Studies in Computational Intelligence, August 2007, Vol. 70.
• Sengupta, R., S. Rezaei, S. Shladover, D. Cody, S. Dickey and H. Krishnan, "Cooperative Collision Warning Systems: Concept Definition and Experimental Implementation," Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, July 2007, Vol. 11, No. 3.
• Xu, Q., T. Mak, J. Ko and R. Sengupta, "Medium Access Control Protocol Design for Vehicle-Vehicle Safety Messages," IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, March 2007, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 499-518.
• Rathinam, S, R. Sengupta and S. Darbha, "A Resource Allocation Algorithm for Multivehicle Systems with Nonholonomic Constraints," IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, January 2007, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 98-104.
• Mak, T., K. Laberteaux, R. Sengupta and M. Ergen, "Multi-Channel Medium Access Control for Dedicated Short Range Communications," IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2007.
• Lee, D., P. Varaiya and R. Sengupta, "Trigonometric k-clustering," In the Wiley IEEE Press Monograph on Sensor Network Operations, Shashi Phoha, Thomas F. La Porta and Christopher Griffin (Editors), January 2006, ISBN: 041719765, pp. 1-33.
Conference Papers
• Kim, Z. W. and R. Sengupta, "Target Detection and Position Likelihood using an Aerial Image Sensor," Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation , May 2008.
• Rezaei, S., R. Sengupta and H. Krishnan, "Reducing the Communication Required by DSRC-Based Vehicle Safety Systems," Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, October 2007, pp.361-366.
• Rathinam, S., P. Almeida, Z. W. Kim, S. Jackson, A. Tinka, W. Grossman and R. Sengupta, "Autonomous Searching and Tracking of a River using an UAV," Proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference, July 2007, pp. 359-364.
• Nguyen, D., J. Tisdale, M. Godwin, D. Coatta, S. Spry, R. Sengupta and J. K. Hedrick, "Decentralized Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Collaborative Sensing Missions," Proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference, July 2007, pp. 4672-4677.
• Rathinam, S. and R. Sengupta, "Lower and Upper Bounds for a Multiple Depot UAV Routing Problem," Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 2006, p. 6.
• Tisdale, J., A. Ryan, M. Zennaro, X. Xiao, D. Caveney, S. Rathinam, J. K. Hedrick and R. Sengupta, "The Software Architecture of the Berkeley UAV Platform," Proceeding of the 2006 IEEE Conference on Computer Aided Control System Design, October 2006, p. 6.
• Ryan, A., X. Xiao, S. Rathinam, J. Tisdale, M. Zennaro, D. Caveney, R. Sengupta and J. K. Hedrick, "A Modular Software Infrastructure for Distributed Control of Collaborating UAVs," AIAA Conference on Guidance, Navigation, and Control, August 2006.
Books
• Kirsch, C. M. and R. Sengupta, The Evolution of Real-Time Programming, Handbook of Real-Time and Embedded Systems, 2006, Chapter 11, pp. 11.1--11.15, doi: ISBN: 1-584886-78-1.
Technical Reports
• Rathinam, S. and R. Sengupta, Lower and Upper Bounds for a Symmetric Multiple Depot, Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem, Technical Report #UCB-ITS-RR-2006-2 Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley http://repositories.c.cdlib.org/its/reports/UCB-ItS-RR-2006-2/, January 2006.
• Rathinam, S., Kim Z. and R. Sengupta, Vision-Based Following of Structures Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Technical Report #UCB-ITS-RR-2006-1, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley, http://repositories.cdlib.org/its/reports/UCB-ITS-RR-2006-1/, January 2006.