ECE Ph.D. Student Wins Prestigious ISR Award

Kasun Weerakoon has been awarded the 2023-2024 George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award. This award is presented annually by the UMD Institute of Systems Research (ISR). He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Weerakoon joined the Department in 2019, after earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He currently works as a graduate research assistant in Professor Dinesh Manocha’s Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion and Animation (GAMMA) Lab.

His research interests include robotics, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems, with a focus on robot perception and planning. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he is studying autonomous robot navigation in complex outdoor environments.

Recently, he co-authored three papers that were presented at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: VAPOR: Legged Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments Using Offline Reinforcement Learning ; MIM: Indoor and Outdoor Navigation in Complex Environments Using Multi-Layer Intensity Maps; and GrASPE: Graph based Multimodal Fusion for Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments.

Weerakoon received the University of Maryland Graduate School’s 2022-2023 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant award.

Published December 16, 2024