Kasun Weerakoon

Ph.D. Student 

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, I'm pursuing my Ph.D. as a graduate research assistant at the GAMMA Lab supervised by Prof. Dinesh Manocha. Recently, I received the University of Maryland Graduate School's Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award for the Academic year 22-23.

My research interests include,

Please visit GAMMA Spot webpage for more details on our recent experiments with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot in complex outdoor environments.

E-mail: kasunw@umd.edu

LinkLinkedInGitHubTwitter

Education

PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering

University of Maryland

Aug. 2019 - Current

B.Sc.(Hons.) in Electrical & Electronic Engineering

University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

Jan. 2014 - Sep. 2017

Recent Publications

K. Weerakoon, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, M. Elnoor, and D. Manocha, “VAPOR: Legged Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments using Offline Reinforcement Learning” submitted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),  2024. 

[Project][Paper][Code]

K. Weerakoon, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, J. Liang, T. Guan, U. Patel, and D. Manocha, “GrASPE: Graph based Multimodal Fusion for Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments” accepted in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,  2023. 

[Project][Paper]

A. J. Sathyamoorthy, K. Weerakoon, T. Guan, Mason Russell, Damon Conover, Jason Pusey, and D. Manocha, “VERN: Vegetation-aware Robot Navigation in Dense Unstructured Outdoor Environments,”  in IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems conference (IROS),  2023. 

[Project][Paper] 

K. Weerakoon*, Souradip Chakraborty*, Nare Karapetyan, Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Amrit Singh Bedi, Dinesh Manocha, “HTRON: Efficient Outdoor Navigation with Sparse Rewards via Heavy Tailed Adaptive Reinforce Algorithm” in Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL),  2022. 

[Project][Paper]

K. Weerakoon, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, U. Patel, and D. Manocha, “TERP: Reliable planning in uneven outdoor environments using deep reinforcement learning,” International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),  2022,  pp. 9447-9453. 

[Project][Paper][Code]

K. Weerakoon, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, and D. Manocha, “Sim-to-Real Strategy for Spatially Aware Robot Navigation in Uneven Outdoor Environments,” in ICRA Workshop on Releasing Robots into the Wild: Simulations, Benchmarks, and Deployment, 2022.

[Paper]

A. J. Sathyamoorthy, K. Weerakoon, T. Guan, J. Liang, and D. Manocha, “TerraPN: Unstructured terrain navigation through Online Self-Supervised Learning,” accepted for IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems conference (IROS),  2022. 

[Project][Paper] 

Jing Liang, Kasun Weerakoon, Tianrui Guan, Nare Karapetyan, Dinesh Manocha, “AdaptiveON: Adaptive Outdoor Navigation Method For Stable and Reliable Actions,”  in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 648-655, Feb. 2023.

[Project][Paper] 

Tianrui Guan, Divya Kothandaraman, Rohan Chandra, Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Kasun Weerakoon, Dinesh Manocha, “GANav: Efficient Terrain Segmentation for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7,  no. 3, pp. 8138-8145,  July 2022.

[Project][Paper]