Vladimir J. Lumelsky

Vladimir Lumelsky is an American scientist and engineer in the fields of robotics, machine intelligence, and sensing. He is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior books editor at the Wiley-IEEE Press Publisher.
==Background==
Lumelsky was born in 1939 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He received his master’s degree in computer science in 1962 from the Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics (presently ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia), and his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics in 1971 from the Institute of Control Sciences (ICS), Russia’s National Academy, Moscow. He then stayed at ICS as a junior and senior researcher till his emigration from Russia in 1975. In the West Lumelsky’s professional career spanned research in large industrial research centers, university professorships, and government research and administration.
In the United States Lumelsky first worked as a researcher in Ford Motor Co. Scientific Laboratories, 1976-1980, then as a senior researcher at the General Electric Research Center, 1981-1985. Having moved then to academia, he held positions of associate professor at Yale University, 1991-2003 (with joint professorships at electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and mathematics departments), and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland-College Park, 2004-13. 
In 1999-2001 he held a concurrent rotator (IPA) position of program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), leading NSF’s national robotics program. Within this assignment, as the NSF representative he spent the summer term of 2000-2001 at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. In 2003 he retired from academia and spent the next ten years at NASA Goddard Space Center, leading the laboratory of space robotics that focused on Mars exploration.
Lumelsky has served as a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Sensors Journal, 2001-2003, senior editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and President of the IEEE Sensors Council, 2012-2013, which represents 25 societies of IEEE. As a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE, he has lectured extensively in many countries in Europe, Asia, and South America.
==Research==
Lumelsky’s research has focused on robotics, machine intelligence, and automatic control. His theory of sensor-based motion planning (SBMP) has introduced a new type of artificial intelligence for robots based on topological properties of space. Using those principles, his team has experimentally demonstrated that a robot can guarantee reaching its target location or concluding the target’s unreachability, in a completely unknown and highly crowded environment. When generalized to three-dimensional arm manipulators, those same principles lead to motion planning strategies for operating in a highly uncertain environment way beyond human intelligence. The strategies also allow a robot’s intelligent response to a human partner’s motion without any prior robot motion programming. These and related principles have been presented in over 250 publications, and summarized in his book, "Sensing, Intelligence, Motion: How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World". 
==Personal life==
Lumelsky is married to biologist Nadya Lumelsky, who has spent most of her career as a researcher and a branch chief at the National Institutes of Health. He has two children - Anna Lumelsky, a graduate of Harvard Law School, presently the division chief deputy at the office of Attorney General of Massachusetts, and son Michael Lumelsky, a graduate of New York University.
Category:1939 births
Category:People from Kharkiv
Category:ITMO University alumni
Category:American scientists
Category:American engineers