Vijay Kumar
Nemirovsky Family Dean, SEAS
Vijay studies collective behaviors in biological and robotic systems. He and his group design novel architectures, create abstractions for systems of interacting individuals, and develop new algorithms for cooperating robots. The overarching themes in his research include modeling nature and developing bio-inspired architectures and algorithms, understanding group/individual dynamics, and the design and composition of controllers for robust, scaleable autonomous systems. Vijay’s key challenges include operation in unstructured, dynamic environments, integration of control, communication and perception, and scaling down to smaller sizes with limited actuation, sensing, and computational resources. *Note: Dean Kumar is unable to take on any new Robotics MSE advisees at this time.
Research Areas
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Research Groups
Startups
Publications
Any Way You Look At It: Semantic Crossview Localization and Mapping with LiDAR
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Dynamically Feasible Task Space Planning for Underactuated Aerial Manipulators
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Fair Robust Assignment using Redundancy
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Adaptive Partitioning for Cooperative Multi-agent Perimeter Defense
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Control of Quadrotors Using the Hopf Fibration on SO(3)
Publisher Springer
Cooperative team strategies for multi-player perimeter-defense games
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Coordinate-Free Dynamics and Differential Flatness of a Class of 6DOF Aerial Manipulators
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
DC-CAPT: Concurrent Assignment and Planning of Trajectories for Dubins Cars
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Dense R-Robust Formations on Lattices
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Evaluating Robust, Perception Based Controllers with Quadrotors
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Feedback Enhanced Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Graph Neural Networks for Motion Planning
Publisher arXiv
Graph policy gradients for large scale robot control
Publisher Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)
IMU-Based Inertia Estimation for a Quadrotor Using Newton-Euler Dynamics
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
IMU-Based Pedestrian Dead Reckoning with Learned Motion Model
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Mine Tunnel Exploration Using Multiple Quadrupedal Robots
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Mobile Wireless Network Infrastructure on Demand
Publisher arXiv
Multi-robot trajectory generation for an aerial payload transport system
Publisher Springer
Reactive Temporal Logic Planning for Multiple Robots in Unknown Environments
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Self-Reconfiguration in Response to Faults in Modular Aerial Systems
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
SLOAM: Semantic lidar odometry and mapping for forest inventory
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Trajectory optimization on manifolds with applications to quadrotor systems
Publisher SAGE Publications
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Analysis of ground effect for small-scale uavs in forward flight
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Autonomous inspection of a containment vessel using a micro aerial vehicle
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Autonomous vehicle for mapping store layout
Publisher US Patent
Catalytic antimicrobial robots for biofilm eradication
Publisher Science Robotics
Cellular expression through morphogen delivery by light activated magnetic microrobots
Publisher Springer
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Design and control of aerial modules for inflight self-disassembly
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher arXiv
Dfusenet: Deep fusion of rgb and sparse depth information for image guided dense depth completion
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Guest Editorial: Special section on “Foundations of resilience for networked robotic systems
Publisher Springer
Mavnet: An effective semantic segmentation micro-network for mav-based tasks
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Online estimation of geometric and inertia parameters for multirotor aerial vehicles
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Realization of -Robust Formations in the Plane Using Control Barrier Functions
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Resilient backbones in hexagonal robot formations
Publisher Springer
Trajectory Tracking with Velocity Constraints Using Control Barrier Functions
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher arXiv
A complete algorithm for generating safe trajectories for multi-robot teams
Publisher Springer
A flying gripper based on cuboid modular robots
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher Annual Reveiws
Publisher SAGE Publications
Autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles using high-rate and low-cost sensors
Publisher Springer
Collaborative multiagent reinforcement learning in homogeneous swarms
Publisher International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
Dense 3-d mapping with spatial correlation via gaussian filtering
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Design guarantees for resilient robot formations on lattices
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Experiments in fast, autonomous, gps-denied quadrotor flight
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Geometric Control and Trajectory Optimization for Bidirectional Thrust Quadrotors
Publisher Springer
Inertial velocity and attitude estimation for quadrotors: Supplementary material
Publisher UPenn Departmental Papers (ESE)
Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Final Annual Report for Program Capstone
Publisher Army Research Laboratory Adelphi United States
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Nuclear environments inspection with micro aerial vehicles: Algorithms and experiments
Publisher Springer
OpenUAV: a UAV testbed for the CPS and robotics community
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Robustness meets deep learning: An end-to-end hybrid pipeline for unsupervised learning of egomotion
Publisher arXiv
Semi-dense visual-inertial odometry and mapping for quadrotors with swap constraints
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher Applied Mechanics Reviews (AMR)
Special issue on high-speed vision-based autonomous navigation of uavs
Publisher Journal of Field Robotics
Stochastic 2-d motion planning with a POMDP framework
Publisher arXiv
The gap in CS, mulling irrational exuberance
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
The grand challenges of Science Robotics
Publisher American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Towards Differentially Private Aggregation of Heterogeneous Robots
Publisher Springer
Towards search-based motion planning for micro aerial vehicles
Publisher arXiv
Trajectory Optimization On Manifolds with Applications to SO (3) and R3XS2.
Publisher Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)
Triangular networks for resilient formations
Publisher Springer
Publisher arXiv
VIO-Swarm:: A swarm of 250g quadrotors
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
A Modular Folded Laminate Robot Capable of Multi Modal Locomotion
Publisher International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER)
Cooperative prediction of time-varying boundaries with a team of robots
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Cooperative transportation using small quadrotors using monocular vision and inertial sensing
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Robust aerial robot swarms without collision avoidance
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Three-dimensional manipulation of teams of quadrotors
Publisher US Patent
A Scalable Strategy for Open Loop Magnetic Control of Microrobots Using Critical Points
Publisher UPenn Departmental Papers (MEAM)
Algorithms for visibility-based monitoring with robot teams
Publisher arXiv
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Independent control of identical magnetic robots in a plane
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Initialization-free monocular visual-inertial state estimation with application to autonomous MAVs
Publisher Springer
Modeling and control of aerial robots
Publisher Springer
Publisher arXiv
Active magnetic anomaly detection using multiple micro aerial vehicles
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Visual servoing of quadrotors for perching by hanging from cylindrical objects
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
News
Faculty News
July 1, 2020
Faculty News
2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award recipient announced!
October 14, 2019
The drone from this Penn spinout can fly inside mines without maps or GPS by Technically Philly
June 28, 2018
Faculty News
Penn Engineering Dean elected to the American Philosophical Society in Penn Engineering News
May 4, 2018
GRASP News
SwRI-led Team to Develop Drones for Use in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
March 20, 2018
GRASP News
Penn drones navigate on their own, could save people from peril in Philly.com
February 13, 2018
GRASP News
Microdrones That Cooperate to Transport Objects Could Be Future of Warehouse Automation
January 15, 2018
GRASP News
“Penn Engineering Offers an Online MicroMasters in Robotics” in Penn Engineering
February 28, 2017
Faculty News
“Exyn unveils AI to help drones fly autonomously, even indoors or off the grid” in Tech Crunch
February 21, 2017
Student News
“Autonomous perching and grasping for micro aerial vehicles” in SPIE Newsroom
February 8, 2017
Student News
Monroe Kennedy and Vijay Kumar featured on Nature Knows Best TV Series
January 27, 2017
GRASP News
“Calling all creatives for new Comcast-Pennovation Challenge” in PennCurrent
January 19, 2017
GRASP News
“The Secret to Small Drone Obstacle Avoidance Is to Just Crash Into Stuff” in the IEEE Spectrum
October 31, 2016
GRASP News
September 30, 2015
Faculty News
Vijay Kumar featured in CCTV interview, “Dialogue: Charting a Course”
September 14, 2015
Student News
“Summer at Penn: Coding Flying Robots!”: Quinn Wu on his summer at GRASP Lab in M&T for Life
September 4, 2015
GRASP News
July 9, 2015
Faculty News
June 2, 2015
Faculty News
February 11, 2015
Faculty News
February 11, 2015
Faculty News
February 11, 2015
GRASP News
The GRASP Lab was featured in the Atlantic’s “Here Come the Swarming Drones”
February 11, 2015
GRASP News
October 29, 2014
Faculty News
September 19, 2014
Faculty News
July 2, 2014
Faculty News
Vijay Kumar, Dan Lee and Katherine Kuchenbecker – LIVE on the Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane
January 16, 2014
GRASP News
“Roboticists from Penn Engineering take on the world” in the Penn Current
January 9, 2014
Faculty News
December 4, 2013
Faculty News
October 15, 2013
GRASP News
Penn Engineering’s GRASP Lab, Wharton’s Mack Institute Take Y-Prize Global in Penn News
October 2, 2013
Faculty News
August 6, 2013
Faculty News
January 28, 2013
GRASP News
“Penn Research Team Awarded $2.75 Million as Part of New ‘Swarm’ Computing Center”…Penn News
January 23, 2013
Faculty News
Dr. Vijay Kumar in PhillyMag.com…”The Smartest People in Philadelphia – Technology”
November 7, 2012
Faculty News
August 10, 2009
Students
Research Staff
Alumni
Research Areas
- Data-Driven Control Algorithms
- Distributed and Decentralized Control
- Autonomy
- Planning
- Multi-robot Systems
- Networked Robots
- Swarm Robots
- Flying Robots