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Bio: I am an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering program in the School of Engineering for Matter, Transport, and Energy at ASU. I received a Master of Engineering and a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2019 and 2021. Before joining ASU, I was a postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was a 2022 DAAD AInet Fellow for the Postdoctoral Networking Tour in Artificial Intelligence in the AI and Robotics domain. I received the Professor Pierre T. Kabamba Award for Excellence in Control Systems and the Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement for my PhD research work in 2021. My research interests include robust control synthesis for multi-agent coordination using machine learning methods, finite- and fixed-time control synthesis for spatiotemporal specifications, and continuous-time optimization. I am a senior member of the IEEE and AIAA.
For students interested in working with me, see the details here.
[June 2026]: I have been elevated to a senior member of IEEE and AIAA.
[June 2026]: Manuscript on "On Fixed-Time Stability of Continuous Dynamics for Non-Monotone Variational Inequalities" submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (joint work with Sina Arefizadeh and Angelia Nedich).
[June 2026]: Our paper (in collaboration with Xi Yu), "Hybrid topology control: a dynamic leader-based distributed edge-addition and deletion mechanism," got accepted at IROS 2026.
[May 2026]: My group will present 3 late-breaking result posters at L4DC 2026.
[Apr 2026]: My student, Elizabeth Eason, successfully defended her Honors thesis on "Missile Control Design for Moving Target Scenarios".
[Mar 2026]: New paper, "Control Barrier Function based Attack-Recovery with Provable Guarantees," in collaboration with Ricardo Sanfelice and Alvaro Cardenas, is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 2026.
[Jan 2026]: Organizing a workshop on large-scale MAS with Chuchu Fan from MIT at the upcoming American Control Conference 2026 to be held in New Orleans from May 26-29.
[Oct 2025]: Devika and Elizabeth to present posters at the Southwest Robotics Symposium 2025.
[Sep 2025]: ASU is hosting the Southwest Robotics Symposium 2025 on Oct 31-Nov 1. Check out the website for the list of the invited speakers.
[Aug 2025]: New paper on fixing failure modes of an offline-trained policy with limited hardware demonstrations accepted at Allerton 2025 (see the preprint here)