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Alumni

Justin Thomas

Justin Thomas

PhD, MEAM '17 - Director Controls- Exyn Technologies

Justin was a PhD student in the GRASP Lab advised by Dean Vijay Kumar. While at Penn, Justin served as a president of MEGA, the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association, received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, earned an honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, was the Technical Advisor for the winning team in the 2012-2013 Y-Prize Competition, and was a member of a winning team in the 2017 MBZIRC competition. His research at GRASP focused on enabling micro aerial vehicles to plan and execute dynamic maneuvers for aerial manipulation and grasping. He also worked to remove the dependency on motion capture systems by leveraging vision-based control.
In 2017, Justin completed his PhD and joined Exyn Technologies, a robotics spinoff from GRASP, where he is now the Director of Controls for the Autonomy & Mapping Team and resides in center city Philadelphia.

Research Groups

Publications

Analysis of ground effect for small-scale uavs in forward flight

Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Autonomous Flight for Detection, Localization, and Tracking of Moving Targets With a Small Quadrotor

Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Aggressive flight with quadrotors for perching on inclined surfaces

Publisher Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics

Safe navigation of quadrotor teams to labeled goals in limited workspaces

Publisher International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER)

The role of vision in perching and grasping for MAVs

Publisher International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE)

Versatile aerial grasping using self-sealing suction

Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Cooperative localization and mapping of MAVs using RGB-D sensors

Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Planning and control of aggressive maneuvers for perching on inclined and vertical surfaces

Publisher ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering (IDETC/CIE)

Visual servoing of quadrotors for perching by hanging from cylindrical objects

Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Vijay Kumar

Nemirovsky Family Dean, SEAS


Justin Thomas