Chris Heckman

Autonomous vehicles are hitting the road in cities across the U.S. Can they be trusted? Researchers from the Department of Computer Science weigh in. External link to the Coloradan Alumni Magazine.

One thousand feet underground, a four-legged creature scavenges through tunnels in pitch darkness. The sound of its movements echo eerily off the walls, but it is not to be feared – this is no wild animal; it is an autonomous rescue robot.

Department of Computer Science assistant professor Chris Heckman and CIRES research hydrologist Toby Minear have been awarded a Grand Challenge Research & Innovation Seed Grant to create an instrument that could revolutionize our understanding of the amount of water in our rivers, lakes, wetlands and coastal areas by greatly increasing the places where we measure it.

Out of 20 students who work in Chris Heckman's lab, five have been approved to head back to their space in the ECES wing of the Engineering Center. There, they’ll be able to field-test the software they’ve been developing in a simulation platform, which they also had to build from scratch to accommodate remote teamwork.

CU Boulder is one of several funded teams in the Subterranean Challenge, a competition launched by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to stimulate and test ideas around autonomous robot use in difficult underground environments.

Assistant Professor Chris Heckman and his team are helping to design robots that view their surroundings using three different types of sensors, including a traditional camera, radar and a laser-based system called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR).

Assistant Professor Christoffer Heckman writes about the ethical challenges of AI-enhanced autonomous systems in The Conversation.