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I am an assistant professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I am a member of the Controls Group at U-M. Previously, I was a research scientist at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), and the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I am a recipient of the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). I was a Best Student Paper Award Finalist at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
I develop AI algorithms that help robots (e.g., self-driving cars/drones/satellites) to understand their surroundings, self-navigate, and collaborate with each other. In broad terms, I care for a trustworthy collaborative autonomy of mobile robots, from self-driving cars to drones to satellites, even when those robots operate in challenging conditions such as unmapped areas, cluttered streets, and adversarial conditions where attackers can take down some of the cars/drones/satellites.
[CV, Bio | Google Scholar | vtzoumas 
umich.edu (he/him/his)]
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Trustworthy Collaborative Autonomy:
- Learning for Perception—(Inter)Action Prediction—Control
- Combinatorial, Non-Convex, and Distributed Optimization
- Novel Self-Reconfigurable Robots
Applications:
- Multi-Robot Planning in Adversarial Environments
(e.g., multi-target tracking, surveillance) - Self-Navigation in Interactive, Dynamic Environments
(e.g., self-driving flying cars in cluttered cities) - Robust and Adaptive Self-Reconfigurable Systems/Robots
(e.g., multi-rotor flying robots, satellite networks)
.
RECENT News
- 02/19/21: I am an Associate Editor for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2021.
- 02/01/21: MathWorks news article on paper Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception.
- 01/01/21: MathWorks SLAM implementation of GNC algorithm proposed in paper Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception.
- 12/13/20: Paper on Robust and Adaptive Sequential Submodular Optimization accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC). With Ali Jadbabaie and George J. Pappas.
- 12/01/20: Paper on Resilient Active Information Acquisition with Teams of Robots conditionally accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO). With Brent Schlotfeldt and George J. Pappas.
- 12/01/20: MATLAB integration of algorithm proposed in Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception: From Non-Minimal Solvers to Global Outlier Rejection.
- 11/27/20: Paper Outlier-Robust Estimation: Hardness, Minimally-Tuned Algorithms, and Applications conditionally accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO). With Pasquale Antonante, Heng (Hank) Yang, and Luca Carlone.
- 08/18/20: Recent algorithmic results on outlier-robust estimation (cf. Best Paper Award in Robot Vision, ICRA 2020) will become an official function in MATLAB 2020b
- 07/16/20: Program committee member, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2020.
- 05/14/20: Paper LQG Control and Sensing Co-Design accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC). With Luca Carlone, George J. Pappas, and Ali Jadbabaie.
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]
