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About

N.P. Costescu is a pioneering researcher in real-time PC-based control systems for robotics, with a career focused on democratizing robot manipulation through accessible, high-performance software platforms. His most significant contributions center on the development of the QMotor and QRobot toolkits, which leverage the QNX real-time operating system to transform standard Intel-based PCs into powerful control environments. The QMotor 3.0 system, his most cited work with 41 citations, introduced an object-oriented, single-processor architecture that allows researchers to implement complex control algorithms as C++ programs, complete with an integrated GUI for testing and tuning. This work, alongside QMotor 2.0 (36 citations), established a new paradigm for low-cost, flexible robot control. Costescu’s QRobot system extended this approach to industrial manipulators like the PUMA, enabling retrofitting of existing controllers with PC-based interfaces. Notably, he applied these technologies to telerobotic decontamination and decommissioning in hazardous environments, integrating virtual reality interfaces for semi-autonomous operation. His research has been instrumental in making advanced robot control accessible to academic and industrial labs, reducing reliance on proprietary hardware and fostering innovation in real-time software development for robotics.