Intelligent Robotics & Autonomy Lab — iRaL

Vasileios Tzoumas

Vasileios Tzoumas is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he leads the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomy Lab (iRAL). His research builds scalable, intelligent, and reliable hardware and algorithms that enable mobile cyber-physical systems perceive their surroundings, self-navigate, and collaborate in resource-constrained, unstructured, and contested environments —from resource-aware optimization for perception, control, and multi-agent coordination, to morphable aerial vehicles with superior control authority.

Previously a post-doc and research scientist at LIDS and Aero/Astro MIT, and a doctoral student at the GRASP Lab of the University of Pennsylvania. Recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an Army Early Career Program Award, a Best Paper on Robot Vision at IEEE ICRA, a Honorable Mention at IEEE RA-L, and a Best Student Paper Finalist at IEEE CDC.

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Vasileios Tzoumas

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RESEARCH INTERESTS

My team and I research scalable, intelligent, and reliable hardware and algorithms that help mobile cyber-physical systems adaptively perceive their surroundings, self-navigate, and collaborate.  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.

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RECENT NEWS

Awards & grants

  • 08/11/2026: Patent granted.
  • 08/11/2026: NSF FRR-NIFA award, in collaboration with the outstanding Profs. Zhaojian Li and Minghui Zheng. Thank you to the reviewers and program for their support.
  • 08/21/2025: Received an Army Early Career (ECP) award. Indebted for the honor and the generous support. Proud of my students. Special thanks to my first three Ph.D. students, Zirui Xu, Hongyu Zhou, and Atharva Navsalkar, for their vision and hard work on resource-aware and self-adaptive decentralized learning and control. Cool papers to appear soon.

Papers

Talks & service

  • 09/25/2026: Associate Editor for ICRA 2027.
  • 01/16/2026: Invited seminar at the 12th Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory, April 25-26. Thank you for the kind invitation!
  • 01/10/2026: Associate editor for IROS 2026.
  • 10/15/2025: Associate editor for L4DC 2026.

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