John R. Stowers
Papers
3
Total Citations
139
H-Index
3
About
John R. Stowers is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and biologically inspired control systems. His primary research areas include autonomous flight control for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), depth perception using low-cost sensors, and bio-inspired navigation strategies. Stowers made a significant early contribution by demonstrating how the Microsoft Kinect—a consumer gaming peripheral—could be repurposed as a reliable, high-rate depth sensor for robotic control. His most cited paper, "Altitude control of a quadrotor helicopter using depth map from Microsoft Kinect sensor" (2011, 126 citations), established a practical, low-cost method for altitude stabilization in quadrotors, paving the way for accessible UAV research. He further explored monocular optical flow and divergence templates for obstacle avoidance, drawing inspiration from insect flight. Additional work integrated Hough transforms with Kinect depth maps for more robust quadrotor flight control. Stowers’s contributions are notable for bridging the gap between affordable consumer hardware and sophisticated autonomous systems, making advanced robotics research more accessible to the broader community.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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