People
Students
Eric Link (2021 — Present)
M.S. Mechanical Engineering
"My research is based on Image-Based Analysis for Disaster Environment Classification. I will be graduating in May 2023."
Matt Dejager
(2021 — Present)
M.S. Mechanical Engineering
"My research focuses on use of Additive Manufacturing in bead foam molding for drone applications. I also support ADDA, a Unicef sponsored program to provide quality drone education to Africa. I will be graduating in Dec 2023"
Diksha Aggarwal
(2022 — Present)
PhD Mechanical Engineering
"I am working on Autonomous search for landing sites in different environments. My work also involves terrain aware flight path generation. I expect to graduate in 2026"
Joshua Lewis
(2021 — Present)
BS Aerospace Engineering
"I work on developing, testing, and maintaining several of our uncrewed aerial systems. I will be graduating in May 2023."
Sarthak Deshmukh
(2022 — Present)
MS in Aerospace Engineering
"I am currently working on novel drone design concept for application of road & public safety. I also handle updation of Uncrewed Systems Laboratory (USL) & African Drone and Data Academy (ADDA) websites. I expect to graduate in May 2024"
Katie Moncure
(Joined in 2023 )
MEng in Aerospace Engineering
"I am currently working on novel drone design concept for application of road & public safety. I will be graduating in May 2023"
Lab Alumni
Recent Ph.D. graduates:
1. Brian César-Tondreau
Dissertation: Towards Improving and Extending Traditional Robot Autonomy with Human-Guided Machine Learning, Virginia Tech, Sept, 2022.
2. Haseeb Chaudhry
Dissertation: Fixed-Wing Classification via perceived motion characterization using Time Frequency Analysis, Virginia Tech, Sept, 2021.
3. Alfred K. Mayalu Jr.
Dissertation: Beyond LiDAR for Unmanned Aerial Localization using Sparse Planar Features in GPS-Denied Environments, Virginia Tech, May, 2021
4. John Peterson
Dissertation: Autonomous source localization, Virginia Tech, 2020
Recent M.S. graduates:
1. Patrick Braun
Thesis: 3D path planning for radiation scanning of cargo containers, Aug, 2022.
2. Jonathan Keller
Thesis: An exploration of the acoustic detection and localization of small uncrewed aerial systems, Aug, 2022.
3. Alexander Broz
Thesis: Human-UAV collaborative search with multiple concurrent flights and retasking, Aug, 2022
4. Avery Sebolt
Thesis: Modeling and control of dual-motored tail-sitting flying wing using a fuzzy logic PID controller, July, 2022
5. Manav Gandhi
Thesis: Analysis of Sensing Technologies for Collision Avoidance for Small Rotary-Wing Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles, May, 2022.
6. Amarir Amine
Thesis: Pre-assessment of the Impact of Designb Challenge Fabrication Modality on Engineering Self-Efficacy, May, 2021.
7. Brianna Friedman
Thesis: Drone imagery applied to enhance flood modeling, May, 2021
8. Shivam Chourey
Thesis: Cooperative Human-Robot Search in a Partially-Known Environment using multiple UAVs, Aug, 2020.
9. Sandhya Bhaskar
Thesis: Adversarial learning based framework for anomaly detection in the context of unmanned aerial systems, Virginia Tech, May, 2020.
10. James Donnelly
Thesis: Semi-dense stereo reconstruction from aerial imagery for improved obstacle detection, Virginia Tech, July, 2019
11. Anthony Wagner
Thesis: Online unmanned ground vehicle mission planning using active aerial vehicle exploration, Virginia Tech, May, 2019
