People


Faculty

Nikolai Matni

Nikolai Matni

Associate Professor, ESE

Nikolai Matni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. Prior to joining Penn, Nikolai was a postdoctoral scholar in EECS at UC Berkeley. He has also held a position as a postdoctoral scholar in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from Caltech in June 2016. He also holds B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research interests broadly encompass the use of learning, optimization, and control in the design and analysis of safety-critical and data-driven cyber-physical systems.

Research Areas

  • Perception-based Control
  • Distributed and Decentralized Control
  • Hybrid Control Systems
  • Learning for Control Systems
  • Nonlinear Control Systems
  • Perception-based Control
  • Robust and Optimized Control
  • Autonomy
  • Machine Learning

Publications

The GRASP Lab [Institutes in Control]

Publisher IEEE Control Systems

Uncertainty-driven Planner for Exploration and Navigation

Publisher IEEE Robotics and Automation Society - ICRA

Evaluating Robust, Perception Based Controllers with Quadrotors

Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Ph.D. Students

Kyle Horton

PhD, ESE


Yash Jain

PhD, CIS


Sunggun Lee

PhD, ESE


Wentinn Liao

PhD, CIS


Anne Somalwar

PhD, AMCS


Research Staff

David Snyder

Postdoctoral Researcher, ESE


Chris Verhoek

Postdoctoral Researcher, ESE


Alumni

Anish Bhattacharya

PhD, CIS '26 - Machine Learning Software Engineer, Zoox


Bernadette Bucher

PhD, CIS '23 - Assistant Professor, University of Michigan


Bruce Lee

PhD, ESE '25 - Postdoctoral Researcher, ETH AI Center


Farhad Nawaz

PhD, ESE '26 - Scientist I, Robotics, Dexterous Manipulation & Robot Learning, Lila Sciences


Alex Nguyen-Le

PhD, ESE '25


Kendall Queen

Robotics MSE '19, PhD ESE '23, PostDoc CIS '23 - Robotics Software Engineer, Asylon Robotics


Anusha Srikanthan

PhD, ESE '26 - Senior Robotics Engineer, Zendar


Fengjun Yang

PhD, CIS '26 - Member of Technical Staff, Dyna Robotics


Thomas Zhang

PhD, ESE '26 - Postdoctoral Researcher, Carnegie Mellon University


Ingvar Ziemann

Postdoctoral Researcher, ESE '23-'25 - Quantitative Researcher, Xantium Group


Nikolai Matni

Research Areas

  • Perception-based Control
  • Distributed and Decentralized Control
  • Hybrid Control Systems
  • Learning for Control Systems
  • Nonlinear Control Systems
  • Perception-based Control
  • Robust and Optimized Control
  • Autonomy
  • Machine Learning