Vijay Kumar

Vijay Kumar

Vijay Kumar is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award, the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (University of Pennsylvania), the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics, the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, a 2012 World Technology Network (wtn.net) award, a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award and the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, and RSS 2013, and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010. Dr. Kumar’s research interests are in robotics, specifically multi-robot systems, and micro aerial vehicles. He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR). He currently serves as Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics and as Advisory Board Member of the AAAS Science Robotics Journal.

  1. Das, R. Fierro, V. Kumar, J. Ostrowski, J. Spletzer, and C. J. Taylor. Vision Based Formation Control of Multiple Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. Vol. 18, No. 5, October 2002: 813-825.
  2. Belta and V. Kumar. Abstraction and control policies for a swarm of robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 20(5):865–875, 2004.
  3. S. Berman, A. Halasz, M. Ani Hsieh, and V. Kumar, Optimized Stochastic Policies for Task Allocation in Swarms of Robots, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, August 2009.
  4. M. Kumar, V. Kumar, and D. Garg, Segregation of heterogeneous units in a swarm of robotic agents, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2010.
  5. M. S. Sakar, E. Steager, D. H. Kim, A. Julius, V. Kumar, G. Pappas and M. J. Kim. Modeling, control and experimental characterization of microbiorobots. International Journal of Robotics Research, 2011.
  6. J. Cappelleri, G. Piazza and V. Kumar. A two dimensional vision-based force sensor for microrobotic applications. Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, 171(2), 2011.
  7. J. Esposito and V. Kumar. An asynchronous integration and event detection algorithm for simulating multi-agent hybrid systems. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, 14(4):363–388, October 2004.
  8. N. Michael, D. Mellinger, Q. Lindsey, and V. Kumar. The GRASP multiple micro UAV testbed. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 3. 2010.
  9. N. Ayanian and V. Kumar. Decentralized feedback controllers for multi-agent teams in environments with obstacles. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2010.
  10. V. Kumar and N. Michael. Opportunities and Challenges with Micro Aerial Vehicles. Int. Journal on Robotics Research, Vol. 31, No. 11, 2012.