I am a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington. I work in the Non-linear Dynamics and Control lab with Prof. Kristi Morgansen. I am currently working towards a Ph.D in end of 2008 having completed a masters thesis in 2005. My research interests include robotics, multi-robot coordination, distributed state estimation, computer vision, and "artificial intelligence" in general. Currently, I am working on finalizing some ideas from my Ph.D research and on finding a post-doc position that suits my interests.

Before coming to Washington state for graduate school, I studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. While there, I worked on several research projects relating to robotics and computer vision.

In other news, I am happily married to my wife Judy. We purchased a 1912 craftsman style home in Kirkland, WA, and have ever since been working on fixing it up. In April 2006, we got a Golden Retriever named Finny. Pictures of Finny and other activities in my personal life.

· To analyze and control the emergent behavior of distributed multi-agent systems.

· To merge ideas from computer science, biology, and info. theory into control theory.

· To create tools for distributed state estimation when inter-agent communication is limited.

· To develop advanced multi-sensor computer vision systems for multi-body tracking.

· To formulate mathematical models of schooling/swarming/flocking in nature.

· As always, please see the publications page for my latest papers and presentations.

· June 11-13th, 2008: I attended the ACC in Seattle, WA.

· June 8th, 2008: Hello Slashdot, ZDNet, Science Daily, Live Science, ABC News.

· June 6th, '08: The robotic fish was featured on King5 news today! Watch the coverage. We also made UWeek, the weekly university news. See also here and here.

· Upcoming on July 19th, '08: I will be presenting at the monthly Seattle Robotics Society meeting along with Prof. Morgansen.

· May '08: I am the first author of an article in the May 2008 issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC). [Link]

· April '08: Engineering Open House was a huge success this year! Unlike previous years, I decided to setup the computer vision system in the outdoor pool so that a fish robot could do fully autonomous 3D waypoint guidance. Despite many confusing image artifacts caused by the uneven water surface, the four-camera particle-filtering system was able to track the fish robot perfectly. (It was worth not sleeping for a week to see the final result!) Here is a brief movie.

· March '08: We demonstrated sinusoidal heading control using three underwater fish robots. The results were presented by Kristi Morgansen (my adviser) at the Second IFAC Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles in Killaloe, Ireland. [Link]

· Oct '07: The paper I co-authored with Jon Ko, Dieter Fox, and Dirk Haehnel has won the Best Student Paper Award at IROS '07. [Link]

· Oct '07: I just returned from Robocomm 2007 in Athens, Greece. The conference was fun and Judy and I had five days to tour the Greek countryside afterwards. If you're interested: paper, slides, pics.

· Sept '07: My internship with Intel Research - Seattle is complete, however I am still working with them. As part of my internship, I developed an attitude estimator for their embedded computer. You can watch a movie, if you like.

· July '07: General Exam - done! The way too long title of the proposed work was, "Multi-Sensor Target Tracking and Second-Level State Estimation for Cooperative Distributed Systems with Limited Communication." Download either the presentation (available soon) or the proposal.

· I have started a wiki for the lab. For those in Prof. Morgansen's Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab, you can access the wiki here.

Email is the best way to contact me ( djklein[at]u[dot]washington[dot]edu ). Otherwise, I can be reached weekdays at the following address.