Welcome to our lab!
Our research is primarily focused on developing scientific principles for enhancing the safety, robustness, and efficiency of autonomous robot systems. We are interested in designing autonomous systems that can perceive and reason about the ambient environment, adapt to unanticipated situations, and effectively coordinate with each other to accomplish complex, long-term, collaborative tasks. To realize this research, we develop new autonomy frameworks drawing tools from distributed control & optimization, multi-agent systems, task and motion planning, machine learning, active sensing and perception, and formal methods.
Bio: Yiannis Kantaros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), St. Louis, MO, USA. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece. He also received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. His current research interests include machine learning, distributed control and optimization, and formal methods with applications in robotics. the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece. He also received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. His current research interests include machine learning, distributed control and optimization, and formal methods with applications in robotics. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2nd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) in 2014 and was a finalist for the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2024. Additionally, he received the 2017-18 Outstanding Dissertation Research Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University and a 2024 NSF CAREER Award.