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I am an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Aerospace), where I lead the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomy Lab (iRaL). Previously, I was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT | AeroAstro & LIDS), and a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn | ESE).

I am a recipient of an Army Early Career Program (ECP) Award, an NSF CAREER Award, the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), an Honorable Mention from the 2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and a Best Student Paper Finalist Award at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

Opening: I am looking for a post-doc or Ph.D. student to work on rigorous algorithms for decentralized optimization at the intersection of robotics, control, and machine learning. Tools of relevance: bandit learning, submodular optimization, online convex optimization, coordinate descent. Please email me (vtzoumas@umich.edu), along with your CV.

My team and I research scalable and reliable algorithms that help mobile cyber-physical systems adaptively perceive their surroundings, self-navigate, and collaborate.  We also investigate adaptive vehicle structures that can enhance the said autonomous behaviors and even enable new ones. We focus on autonomous systems that must operate in resource-constrained, unstructured, and contested environments, such as the systems found in defense, disaster response, and smart cities.

We work at the intersection of control, robotics, combinatorial optimization, and online learning, contributing, on the cyber side, resource-aware and near-optimal algorithms for perception, control, and multi-agent coordination, and, on the physical side, morphable aerial vehicles for superior control authority and situational awareness.

[CV, Bio | Google Scholar | vtzoumas umich.edu (he/him/his) | 3049 François-Xavier Bagnoud Building]

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Collaborative Autonomy:

  • Online Learning and Optimization
  • Perception-Computation-Communication-Control Co-Design
  • Novel Self-Reconfigurable Robots

Applications:

  • Online Learning for Extreme Agility
  • Multi-Robot Planning in Resource-Constrained, Unpredictable, Contested Environments
  • Resilient Morphable Multi-Rotors

[Team | Publications | Bio]

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RECENT NEWS

Ithaca | Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventures, full of learning.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon —don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
[...] 

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.

[full poem, in Greek, and translated in English]