I have worked on a range of robotic platforms from aerial vehicles to lunar rovers. I am part of the team working on the Stanford/Berkeley Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) platform, which is an autonomous aerial vehicle. I have contributed to the core functionality as well as demonstrations for autonmous navigating through uncertain 3D environments, autonomous backflip, and autonomous path planning. I have also worked at NASA Ames in the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) where I developed hazard/obstacle avoidance methods for a lunar robot; it was successfully tested on over 500 meters of autonomous driving.

I was born in 1982 and lived in Amsterdam, NY. For undergrad, I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. In 2004, I graduated summa cum laude with a dual degree in Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. I graduated from Stanford University in March 2012 with a PhD. and Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics. I worked in the Hybrid Systems Lab under Professor Claire Tomlin. My thesis was on planning under uncertainty and I developed the first successful, real-time experimental demonstration of chance constrained control on a quadrotor vehicle navigating through a 3D environment. My research interests are in: dynamics and control, estimation, sensor fusion, motion planning, optimization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

In my spare time I like to take panoramic photos. My favorites are located here.

As any engineer, I really enjoy data and I created a script to track my words in my thesis over time which is shown on the Thesis-O-Meter.

In a similar idea as Thesis-O-Meters, I made a SVN-O-Meter which plots my SVN commit number versus date of commit. (The progress has slowed since I have graduated in March 2012.)