Projects and Research

Current projects:

  • Precision Control of High-speed Autonomous Vehicles under High Disturbances (Army STTR; 2023-2024, with A. Willis, D. Maity, and Corvid Technologies). This project seeks the development and demonstration of algorithms that support near-optimal control of autonomous high speed aerial vehicles in real time, with precision, and in challenging and adversarial environments.
  • ERI: Wind Field Estimation and Path Planning for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles in Urban Environments (NSF; 2023-2025, with M. Uddin). This project aims to improve the fundamental understanding of how aerial robots with limited computational capabilities can collaboratively estimate and exploit a complex urban wind field to plan safer and more efficient flight paths.
  • Evaluation of Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) Technology for Bathymetric Surveying of Inland Environments (NCDOT; 2023-2025). The long-term goal of this research is to improve the capability of NCDOT to efficiently and cost-effectively collect high-quality bathymetric survey data using unmanned surface vessel platforms in inland bodies of water.

Current/Past Sponsors:

research areas:

Optimal Path Planning for Nonholonomic Vehicle Models

This research investigates optimal path planning of nonholonomic vehicle models (e.g., variations of the Dubins car) using tools from nonlinear optimal control theory. We also investigate combined motion-task planning posed as a mixed continuous/combinatorial optimization, similar to the Dubins Traveling Salesperson Problem (DTSP).

Past and ongoing work:

  • Planning visual inspection tours for a 3D Dubins airplane model in an urban environment [Link]
  • The orbiting Dubins traveling salesman problem (ODTSP): [Link]
  • Minimum-energy paths in gliding flight: [Link], [Link],
  • Time-optimal trajectories for a Dubins car with variable speed (and turn rate) controls: [Link]
  • Feasible Dubins paths in the presence of unsteady velocity disturbances: [Link]

Optimization-Based Control for Robust Vehicle Motion in Winds

This research investigates multi-vehicle spatial wind-field mapping/estimation and optimization-based control strategies to improve the robustness of atmospheric and ocean vehicles.

Past and ongoing work:

  • Ongoing work: Cooperative control of a network of autonomous quadrotors in an uncertain wind-field
  • Ongoing work: Urban wind field estimation and path planning

Adaptive Sampling with Mobile Sensor Networks

Adaptive sampling is a feedback control framework in which mobile sensors assimilate measurements to estimate an uncertain process and, in turn, the estimate of the process guides the collection of future measurements. An adaptive sampling framework considers the dynamics of the mobile sensors, their sensing and communication capabilities, and a continuous or discrete model of the process of interest to allocate trajectories that optimize a sampling metric. The need for adaptive sampling arises in numerous applications that involve exploration, mapping, monitoring of spatiotemporal processes.

Past and ongoing work:

  • Ongoing work: Autonomous sensing of a Gaussian spatial process with multiple heterogeneous agents
  • Search planning in a large state space with environmentally varying sensor performance: [Link] [Link]

Adaptive Multi-Target Tracking and Cooperative Navigation

This research designs estimation and adaptive control algorithms for robots to intelligently search for and track moving objects (called “targets”) in their environment.

Past and ongoing work:

  • Ongoing work: multi-vehicle cooperative navigation with intermittent aiding
  • Information-theoretic guidance of a quadrotor team to balance mapping and search in an urban environment: [Link]
  • Adaptive behaviors for passive sonar tracking of multiple surface vessels with an autonomous underwater vehicle: [Link] [Link]

Aerial and Marine Robotics

This research develops robotic prototype vehicles that integrate and exploit novel actuation and sensing to improve vehicle performance and create novel capabilities.

Past and ongoing work:

  • Planar formation control of bio-inspired underwater vehicles: [Link]
  • Underwater gliders with pneumatic buoyancy control and cylindrical moving mass actuators [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link]
  • Wing-morphing aircraft with piezoelectric control surfaces [Link]
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for curriculum enhancement and controls research [Link], [Link]