Faculty

Huy T. Tran Huy is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Illinois at 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, Smart Transportation Infrastructure Initiative, and Applied Research Institute.

Graduate Students

Jacob Heglund Jacob is a Ph.D. student in the Aerospace Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. He researches algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty, specifically in cooperative, distributed team settings. One of his 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. Mikihisa (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. Minjae (MJ) Cho MJ 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 past and current research have focused on developing reliable and safe autonomous systems for robots. His primary area of interest is Reinforcement Learning and learning-based control, with a particular emphasis on ensuring theoretical safety guarantees. Hamid Osooli Hamid is a PhD student in the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He holds a master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, specializing in flight dynamics and control, from Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of Technology (KNTU) in Iran, and a second MSc in Computer Science, focusing on AI and Robotics, from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). As a full-stack roboticist, his research has covered a wide range of topics, including multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), optimization and planning, machine learning, sensor fusion, and robot design. Currently, his work focuses on multi-robot systems, with an emphasis on multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Undergraduate Students

Aryan Arora Sahil Vazhathodiyil Nithya Koneru Gokul Narayan Johnny Hu Siddharth Gummadapu Ishaan Kandamuri

Alumni

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 for machine learning Karl Thompson M.S., 2017-2019 Placement at Spark Insights for data science Keshav Chandramouleeswaran M.S., 2017-2018 Placement at Front End Analytics for data science

Pictures

Some group members at IROS 2023 in Detroit, MI.
2021 holiday party at Huy's house.