Zachary Kingston

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Joined department: Fall 2024

Education

Dr. Zachary Kingston is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Purdue University, where he leads the Computational Motion, Manipulation, and Autonomy (CoMMA) Lab. He completed his master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral studies with Dr. Lydia E. Kavraki in the Computer Science Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas, studying manifold-constrained motion planning and long-horizon multi-modal motion planning. Throughout his Ph.D. studies, he was funded by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship and worked with the Robonaut 2 team within the Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division at NASA Johnson Space Center.

He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters under Planning and Simulation and the current maintainer of the Open Motion Planning Library, an open-source library with standard implementations of state-of-the-art sampling-based motion planners.

His research interests broadly encompass algorithms, methods, and software for complex robots to make decisions and find feasible or optimal motions to achieve task objectives safely in the world. He is interested in techniques that generalize and apply to any robotic system, constraint, or environment and are fast, efficient, and easy to use within a broader system. He is also interested in the intersection between the theory and practice of robotics algorithms, finding where software engineering, hardware acceleration, and intelligent algorithm design can synergize to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Selected Publications