Principal Investigator
Huy T. Tran
Huy is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. He received a B.S. degree from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC in 2008, and an M.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, in 2010, both in Mechanical Engineering. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2014 and 2015. Subsequently, he was a Senior Multi-disciplinary Systems Engineer at the MITRE Corporation before joining the University of Illinois. He is an affiliate of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Illinois Robotics Group, Center for Autonomy, and Smart Transportation Infrastructure Initiative.
Graduate Students
Jaye Heglund
Jaye is a Ph.D. student in the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. They research algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty, specifically in cooperative, distributed team settings. One of their primary goals is to develop safe and verifiable autonomous systems to control complex, interconnected infrastructure, such as transportation networks and power grids.
Rupal Nigam
Rupal is a Ph.D. student in the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL and received her BSE in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include human-machine teaming and bio-inspired learning for adaptive autonomy. She is a recepient of the GAANN fellowship (2020-22) and the ISGC fellowship (2022-23). Overall, she aspires to help improve and sustain society through collaborative autonomy.
Miki Yuasa
Miki is a graduate research assistant currently pursuing a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His chief interests lie in the development of automated intelligent transportation systems (ITS). His current research is on inference of the behaviors of deep reinforcement learning agents using formal logics.
Niket Parikh
Niket is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC. His research interests lie at the intersection of reinforcement learning, machine learning, and optimal control for safe and autonomous transportation systems. Previously, he graduated from IIT Bombay with a dual degree. During his undergraduate, he worked in the area of robust model predictive control.
MJ (Minjae) Cho
MJ (Minjae) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Applied Mathematics from Mississippi State University. His research focuses on deploying robust, autonomous AI in complex robotic systems at the intersection of reinforcement learning and control theory.
Alumni
Karl Thompson
M.S., 2017-2019
Placement at Spark Insights
Keshav Chandramouleeswaran
M.S., 2017-2018
Placement at Front End Analytics
Neale Van Stralen
Research Engineer, 2020-2022
M.S., 2018-2020
Placement at the Naval Nuclear Laboratories
Walker Dimon
M.S., 2020-2022
Placement at the MITRE Corporation