Ritesh Sharma, Ph.D
Leads research on reliability-aware autonomy for robots and drones, and mentors undergraduate and graduate student researchers.
Email: sharmar33@vcu.edu
Areas of Expertise
Robotics, Reliability-aware autonomy, Multi-robot and multi-UAV systems, State estimation and sensor fusion, Uncertainty quantification, Motion planning and navigation, Mobile manipulation, Computational geometry, UAV photogrammetry, Computer graphics and visualization
Links
Biography
Dr. Ritesh Sharma is a Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research focuses on reliability-aware autonomy, enabling robots to recognize when their sensor measurements and state estimates are unreliable and account for that uncertainty in planning and control. Autonomous systems can fail even when their internal estimates appear confident. Sharma addresses this challenge by combining geometric reasoning, which characterizes what a robot can observe and how its configuration affects estimation quality and stability, with uncertainty calibration, which evaluates whether a model’s stated confidence reflects its actual errors.
His research interests span three interconnected thrusts. The first investigates how sensor geometry and observer configuration determine whether a robot’s state can be reliably estimated. His contributions include a filtering method that adapts to geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) for cooperative multi-drone tracking and a GDOP-based approach to ground control point placement in UAV photogrammetry. Patent applications have been filed on both approaches. The second examines how localization and payload uncertainty affect the dynamic stability of mobile manipulators. The third develops methods for identifying unreliable predictions in learned models and multi-sensor systems under changing operating conditions. His work has appeared in IEEE, ACM, and Eurographics venues, including IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, and the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication. His research has received support from VCU Research and Innovation, the VIPC Commonwealth Commercialization Fund, and the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative.
Before joining VCU, Dr. Sharma was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tulsa’s Institute for Robotics and Autonomy and at Missouri University of Science and Technology’s Center for Intelligent Infrastructure. At Amazon Robotics, he developed motion-planning methods for warehouse robots operating around uncertain obstacles. He has also held research positions at Dolby Laboratories and PARC. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Merced, where his dissertation focused on navigation structures for multi-agent coordination, and his M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University. At VCU, he mentors graduate and undergraduate researchers and supervises senior capstone projects on cooperative multi-UAV tracking and drone-based 3D reconstruction.