Kasun Weerakoon

Ph.D. Student 

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate 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. My dissertation research focuses on autonomous robot navigation in complex outdoor environments. 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,

I have experience in developing autonomous navigation algorithms and porting them to real robot platforms such as  Turtlebot 2, Clearpath Husky, Jackal, Boston Dynamics Spot, and Ghost Vision 60.

E-mail: kasunw@umd.edu

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Education

PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering

University of Maryland, College Park.

Aug. 2019 - Current

M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, College Park.

Aug. 2019 - May 2024

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

University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

Jan. 2014 - Sep. 2017

Recent Publications

K. Weerakoon, M. Elnoor, G. Seneviratne, V. Rajagopal, S. H. Arul , J. Liang, M. Jaffar and D. Manocha, "BehAV: Behavioral Rule Guided Autonomy Using VLMs for Robot Navigation in Outdoor Scenes", under review in ICRA 2025.

A. J. Sathyamoorthy, K. Weerakoon, M. Elnoor, A. Zore, B. Ichter, F. Xia, J. Tan and D. Manocha, "CoNVOI: Context-aware Navigation using Vision LanguageModels in Outdoor and Indoor Environments," accepted in IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems conference (IROS), 2024.

M. Elnoor, K. Weerakoon, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, T. Guan, V. Rajagopal and D. Manocha, "AMCO: Adaptive Multimodal Coupling of Vision and Proprioception for Quadruped Robot Navigation in Outdoor Environments," accepted in IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems conference (IROS),  2024.

A. J. Sathyamoorthy*, K. Weerakoon* , M. Elnoor,  Mason Russell, Jason Pusey, and D. Manocha, “MIM: Indoor and Outdoor Navigation in Complex Environments Using Multi-Layer Intensity Maps” in International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),  2024. 

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

M. Elnoor, A. J. Sathyamoorthy, K. Weerakoon, and D. Manocha, "ProNav: Proprioceptive traversability estimation for legged robot navigation in outdoor environments," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2024.

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” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,  2023. 

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

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.