Jason O'Kane

Jason O'Kane is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, part of the College of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2007) and focuses on robotics planning, autonomous systems, and computational geometry.

Education:

• Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007
• M.S., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005
• B.S., Computer Science, Taylor University, 2001

Research Interests: Autonomous robots, planning algorithms, computational geometry. His work includes navigation, multi-robot systems, and sensor-based planning. Notable contributions involve visibility-based pursuit-evasion and combinatorial filter reduction.

Awards:

• Distinguished Service Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2020)
• NSF CAREER Award (2010)

Grants & Funding: Supported by NSF, ERDC, and Texas A&M. Active projects include resilient planning for fallible actuators and multi-robot environmental sampling.

Advising & Teaching: Advised 8 graduate students. Taught courses like Robotics and Spatial Intelligence, Analysis of Algorithms, and Robotics at Texas A&M and the University of South Carolina.

Labs & Teams: Leads the Aggie Autonomous Robotics Research Group, focusing on algorithms for autonomous robots. Collaborates on projects like AquaVis for underwater navigation and socially assistive robotics for autism therapy.