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About

Karen Petersen is a robotics researcher whose work spans autonomous navigation, search and rescue robotics, multi-robot systems, and humanoid robot behavior. She is perhaps best known for her contributions to the Hector project, an open-source software framework for autonomous mapping and navigation in rescue robotics, which has garnered over 157 citations and stands as her most influential work. This contribution reflects her broader commitment to reusable, community-driven software development for the search and rescue domain — a theme reinforced by her work on standard software modules designed to expand accessible building blocks for rescue robot teams. Petersen has also made notable contributions to semantic world modeling using heterogeneous sensors in urban search and rescue environments, as well as to task allocation strategies for heterogeneous robot teams using mixed-integer linear programming approaches. Her early career work focused on realistic simulation of multi-robot and humanoid robot systems, including motion simulation and collision detection for soccer-playing humanoids. Complementing these technical contributions, she has explored human-robot interaction, proposing communication frameworks that enable effective human supervision of autonomous robot teams. Across her body of work, Petersen demonstrates a consistent drive to make autonomous robotic systems more capable, collaborative, and practically deployable in high-stakes environments.