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Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Stiffler is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Dayton. Before joining UD, Dr. Stiffler was a Postdoctoral Researcher for the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina. Prior to that, he spent a year as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, under the joint mentorship of Dr. Kostas Bekris and Dr. Jingjin Yu. Dr. Stiffler received his Ph.D. (2016) and M.S. (2012) degrees from the University of South Carolina under the advisement of Dr. Jason O'Kane.

Research interests

Dr. Stiffler's interests span algorithmic robotics and related areas, including computational geometry, multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence, sensor networks and motion planning.

Research overview

Dr. Stiffler's research is in the design and implementation of planners for a variety of complex robotic planning problems that pose inherent computational challenges. This research seeks to exploit the underlying geometric and/or combinatorial structure of problems to design algorithms that have rigorous theoretical properties. Meticulous study into the underlying computational challenges of these problems can yield insight that leads to the development of efficient approximation algorithms as well as algorithms that are robust to uncertainty. This approach caters to ideologies of algorithmic robotics and field robotics by (i) providing strong formal guarantees for well-defined mathematical models of the environment, and (ii) designing robust systems that operate in the physical world where structured models typically need to be relaxed to account for constraints such as real-time performance and uncertainty.

Professional activities

• Association for Computing Machinery, 2008-present.
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2010-present. Member, 2016-present. Student member, 2010-2016.
• IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), 2011-present. Technical Committees: Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion; Multi-Robot Systems; Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2013-present.

Recent selected publications

Trevor Olsen, Nicholas M. Stiffler, Jason M. O'Kane. Rapid Recovery from Robot Failures in Multi-Robot Visibility-Based Pursuit-Evasion. To appear in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Prague, Czech Republic, October 2021.

Trevor Olsen, Anne Tumlin, Nicholas M. Stiffler, Jason M. O'Kane. A visibility roadmap sampling approach for a multi-robot visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Xi'an, China, June 2021.

Nicholas M. Stiffler, Jason M. O'Kane. Planning for robust visibility-based pursuit-evasion. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A., October 2020. publisher url: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9341031

Shuai D. Han, Nicholas M. Stiffler, Athanasios Krontiris, Kostas E. Bekris, and Jingjin Yu. Complexity Results and Fast Methods for Optimal Tabletop Rearrangement with Overhand Grasps. International Journal of Robotics Research, OnlineFirst, July 2018. publisher url: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0278364918780999

Shuai D. Han, Nicholas M. Stiffler, Kostas E. Bekris, and Jingjin Yu. Efficient, High-Quality Stack Rearrangement. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,3, 2018. publisher url: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8276280

Nicholas M. Stiffler, Jason M. O'Kane. Complete and Optimal Visibility-Based Pursuit-Evasion. International Journal of Robotics Research, 36:923--946, July 2017. publisher url: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0278364917711535

Shuai D. Han, Nicholas M. Stiffler, Athanasios Krontiris, Kostas E. Bekris, and Jingjin Yu. High-Quality Tabletop Rearrangement with Overhand Grasps: Hardness Results and Fast Methods. In Proc. Robotics: Science and Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., July 2017.\newline% Nominated for "Best Student Paper." publisher url: http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss13/p51.html

Nicholas M. Stiffler, Andreas Kolling, Jason M. O'Kane. Persistent Pursuit-Evasion: The Case of the Preoccupied Pursuer. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 5027--5034, 2017. publisher url: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7989586/

Nicholas M. Stiffler, Jason M. O'Kane. Pursuit-Evasion with Fixed Beams. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 4251--4258, 2016. publisher url: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7487621/