Fatemeh Zahra Saberifar

About

Fatemeh Zahra Saberifar’s research lies at the intersection of robotics, algorithmic design, and formal methods, with a focus on the principled co-design of robot hardware and software. Her work addresses a fundamental challenge: how to minimize a robot’s sensing and actuation complexity while ensuring it can still complete its tasks. She has pioneered the study of combinatorial filter reduction and set-labelled filters, providing formal frameworks for determining which sensor modifications or degradations leave a robot’s behavior unaffected. Her contributions have been recognized with over 70 citations across her most-cited papers, including foundational works like “Set-labelled filters and sensor transformations” (14 citations) and “Toward a language-theoretic foundation for planning and filtering” (13 citations). Saberifar has also advanced the understanding of the computational hardness of minimizing design cost subject to planning problems, showing that even seemingly simple co-design questions are algorithmically challenging. Her 2021 paper “On the Design of Minimal Robots That Can Solve Planning Problems” is a key reference in the field. Through her rigorous theoretical contributions, Saberifar has given roboticists principled tools to reason about the trade-offs between design cost, sensor complexity, and task performance.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Set-labelled filters and sensor transformations

   14 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Toward a language-theoretic foundation for planning and filtering

   13 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Combinatorial filter reduction: Special cases, approximation, and fixed-parameter tractability

   11 citations · 2016
4. 4
   On the Design of Minimal Robots That Can Solve Planning Problems

   11 citations · 2021
5. 5
   The Hardness of Minimizing Design Cost Subject to Planning Problems

   7 citations · 2020
6. 6
   Beyond the Planning Potpourri: Reasoning About Label Transformations on Procrustean Graphs

   7 citations · 2020
7. 7
   Charting the trade-off between design complexity and plan execution under probabilistic actions

   5 citations · 2022
8. 8
   Inconsequential improprieties: Filter reduction in probabilistic worlds

   2 citations · 2017
9. 9
   Improper Filter Reduction

   2 citations · 2017
10. 10
    The hardness of minimizing design cost subject to planning problems

    2 citations · 2019

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links