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About

P.K. Khosla is a pioneering researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and real-time systems. His most influential contributions center on autonomous robot navigation, visual tracking, and reconfigurable robotic software architectures. Khosla's groundbreaking work on harmonic potential functions for obstacle avoidance—accumulating over 1,000 citations across two landmark publications—elegantly resolved a fundamental flaw in earlier artificial potential approaches by eliminating problematic local minima in cluttered environments, enabling reliable real-time navigation for both mobile robots and manipulators. Equally impactful is his research on robotic visual tracking, where he pioneered the fusion of control theory and computer vision for eye-in-hand robotic configurations, with foundational papers earning over 800 combined citations. His adaptive visual servoing algorithms extended this work to full six-degree-of-freedom 3D tracking scenarios with uncertain parameters. Beyond perception and motion planning, Khosla made lasting contributions to software engineering for robotics, introducing port-based objects as a flexible abstraction for real-time reconfigurable systems and developing the CHIMERA II operating environment. His later exploration of gesture-based human-robot interaction reflects a consistent drive toward more intuitive, sensor-rich robotic systems. Collectively, his body of work has profoundly shaped modern autonomous and interactive robotics research.