Maryland Robotics Center Research Symposium 2025

Title: Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles with Applications to Precision Agriculture and Forestry

Abstract: Autonomous robots enable the automated creation of high-quality maps, which is tedious to do manually, especially in hard-to-access, dangerous environments.  In this talk, I will describe our work on developing intelligent micro aerial vehicles, the abstractions, architecture, and algorithms used for mission specification, motion planning and control, and semantic mapping in GPS-denied environments. I will show how our robots can fly autonomously under the forest canopy and between tree lines to acquire information for precision agriculture and forestry. 

Vijay Kumar is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1987. He has been on the Faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.

In addition to holding many administrative positions at Penn, Kumar has served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2012 – 2013). His lab has spun off many startups in robotics, and he is the founder of Exyn Technologies. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and was the chief editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, RSS 2013, ICRA 2014, BICT 2015, and MARSS 2016 and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010. He is the recipient of the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, a 2012 World Technology Network (wtn.net) award, a 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award, the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award, the 2017 ASME Robert E. Abbott Award, the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award, and the 2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Field Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013, American Philosophical Society in 2018, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022, and the National Academy of Inventors in 2023.

To be posted.

Dr. Stephanie Gil is an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University, having joined in July 2020. Before her appointment at Harvard, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University (ASU), within the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE). At ASU, she directed the REACT Lab (Robotics, Embedded Autonomy, and Communication Theory Lab).

Dr. Gil completed her dissertation at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where she developed her expertise in robotics and multi-robot systems. Her research focuses on advancing robot-robot and human-robot teamwork, with a particular emphasis on improving communication and coordination within these systems. Specifically, she explores ways to use wireless signals for more efficient communication in multi-robot teams, enhances situational awareness, and secures critical multi-agent algorithms against cybersecurity threats. Additionally, Dr. Gil has worked on exploring the use of brain signals to facilitate communication in human-robot teams.

Her work extends to practical applications such as indoor positioning systems, human-robot collaboration, and improving the security and robustness of robot-robot teams. Dr. Gil has been recognized with a prestigious NSF CAREER Award in 2019 and was named a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow. She has also held a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Stanford University in 2019, collaborating with the Stanford Robotics Lab.

Her research has received widespread media attention, with coverage in outlets such as MIT News, Wired, and Forbes. A video of her thesis work on multi-vehicle networks can be viewed on YouTube under the title "Multi-Vehicle Network with Adaptation."