Aero PhD student Jonathan Manni was recently awarded a Draper Fellowship, among the first ever cohort of CU students to be named Draper Fellows — congratulations, Jonathan!

Aero PhD student Steve McGuire passed his Aerospace PhD Comprehensive Exam, and is now officially a PhD candidate — congratulations, Steve!

PhD student Brett Israelsen has passed his PhD Comprehensive Exam in Computer Science, and is now officially a PhD candidate — congratulations, Brett!

PhD student Luke Burks’ submission, “Optimal Continuous State POMDP Planning with Semantic Observations”, has been accepted to and will appear in the 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Melbourne, Australia this December — congratulations Luke!

PhD student Luke Burks’ work on “Optimal Continuous State Planning with Semantic Observations” will appear at the 2017 Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision-Making in Ann Arbor, MI this June.

I will be co-organizing two workshops at RSS 2017 in Cambridge, MA this year:

“Bridging the Gap in Space Robotics” (led by Chris Heckman, Dan Szafir, and Jay McMahon)

“Morality and Social Trust in Autonomous Robots” (led by Morteza Lahijanian,
Mária Svoreňová, Marta Kwiatkoska, and Patrick Lin)

Professor Nisar Ahmed’s research explores new algorithms and models for probabilistic reasoning that promote cooperative intelligence in mixed teams of humans and autonomous robotic vehicles. The COHRINT Lab blends this cutting-edge theory with real-world robotic software and hardware.

Key problem areas for aerospace applications include:

• integrated sensing, perception, planning and control in human-robot teams
• learning and prediction of human/autonomy decision making and task performance
• fusion of complex information in dynamic sensor networks