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Our Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Paper was Accepted by Applied Sciences - 06/23/2025
Our Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Paper was Accepted by Applied Sciences - 06/23/2025
Ben Taylor, Mathew Allen, Preston Sellards, Xu (James) Gao, Haroon Malik, Pingping Zhu, "Enhancing Drone Navigation and Control: Gesture-Based Piloting, Obstacle Avoidance, and 3D Trajectory Mapping," Applied Sciences, accepted. here.
James (Xu) Gao defended his thesis successfully - 06/17/2025
James (Xu) Gao defended his thesis successfully - 06/17/2025
James Gao defensed his thesis successfully
Thesis: Very Large Scale Robotics Path Planning with Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation
Dr. Zhu was invited to chair a technical paper session for ICRA 2025 - 04/27/2024
Dr. Zhu was invited to chair a technical paper session for ICRA 2025 - 04/27/2024
Dr. Zhu was invited to the technical paper session - "Perception Systems" by 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025)
Dylan Lester won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/04/2025
Dylan Lester won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/04/2025
Dylan Lester is an undergrad student in our lab. His proposal, titled "Training YOLO Models with Assisted Labeling Techniques and RGB-D Fusion," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Samuel Sutphin won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/04/2025
Samuel Sutphin won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/04/2025
Samuel Sutphin is an undergrad student in our lab. His proposal, titled "Human Operator in Drone Swarm Control Loop," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/26/2025
NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/26/2025
Dr. Pingping Zhu's project, "ACERS-GCVT: Adaptive Coverage and Exploration for Robotic Swarms Using Gaussian Distribution-Based Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation" was awarded the NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant of $22,172.
The details of this grant can be found here.
James Gao was awarded the student travel grant by ACC 2025 - 03/03/2025
James Gao was awarded the student travel grant by ACC 2025 - 03/03/2025
James Gao was awarded the student travel grant by ACC 2025, on the paper, "SwarmCVT: Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation-Based Path Planning for Very-Large-Scale Robotics," American Control Conference (ACC), 2025, Denver, USA.
Dr. Zhu was elevated to IEEE Senior Member. - 02/01/2025
Dr. Zhu was elevated to IEEE Senior Member. - 02/01/2025
Our paper is accepted by ACC 2025 - 01/16/2025
Our paper is accepted by ACC 2025 - 01/16/2025
James Gao, Jacob Lee, Yuting Zhou, Yunze Hu, Chang Liu, and Pingping Zhu, "SwarmCVT: Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation-Based Path Planning for Very-Large-Scale Robotics," American Control Conference (ACC), 2025, Denver, USA.
Samuel Sutphin won Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Spring 2025 - 12/12/2024
Samuel Sutphin won Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Spring 2025 - 12/12/2024
Samuel Sutphin is an undergrad student in our lab. His proposal, titled "Multi-Camera Gesture Recognition," was awarded the Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Spring 2025 of $1,750 + $750 (for faculty mentor).
The details of this grant can be found here.
Our paper is accepted by Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2024 - 10/22/2024
Our paper is accepted by Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2024 - 10/22/2024
Yucheng Chen, Pingping Zhu, Anthony Alers, Tobias Egner, Marc A. Sommer, and Silvia Ferrari. "Heuristic Satisficing Inferential Decision Making in Human and Robot Active Perception." arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.07720 (2024).
American Control Conference - 07/08/24 - 07/12/24
American Control Conference - 07/08/24 - 07/12/24
Dr. Zhu present his paper "A Novel Multivariate Skew-Normal Mixture Model and Its Application in Path-Planning for Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems" at American Control Conference in Toronto, Canada.
The details of the paper and the presentation can be found here.
NASA WV Grants - 04/26/2024
NASA WV Grants - 04/26/2024
Four undergraduate students and Dr. Pingping Zhu were all awarded NASA WV Grants. Our lab secured a total of $42,138.
The details of all grants can be found here.
NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/26/2024
NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/26/2024
Dr. Pingping Zhu's project "Study of Wasserstein Metric in Obstacle-Deployed Environments and Its Application to Multi-Scale Robotic Spatial Exploration Systems " was awarded the NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant of $22,138.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Ben Taylor won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Ben Taylor won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Ben Taylor is an undergrad student in our lab. his proposal, titled "Advancements in Autonomous Drone Operations: A Research Project on Obstacle Avoidance Techniques," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Preston Sellards won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Preston Sellards won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Preston Sellards is an undergrad student in our lab. his proposal, titled "Advancements in Autonomous Drone Operations: Emergency Response and Recognition," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Mathew Allen won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Mathew Allen won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Mathew Allen is an undergrad student in our lab. his proposal, titled "Human Interaction in Drone Operations," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Jacob Lee won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Jacob Lee won NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship - 04/25/2024
Jacob Lee is an undergrad student in our lab. his proposal, titled "Comparison of Penalty Terms of Obstacle Avoidance for Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems ," was awarded the NASA WVSGC Undergraduate Fellowship of $5,000.
The details of this grant can be found here.
Students presented on WV Undergraduate Research Day at the Capital - 02/22/2024
Students presented on WV Undergraduate Research Day at the Capital - 02/22/2024
Students presented their poster on WV Undergraduate Research Day at the Capital today.
The poster can be found here.
Two projects Dr. Zhu participating in were granted by ERDC - 02/01/2024
Two projects Dr. Zhu participating in were granted by ERDC - 02/01/2024
ERDC Grant, "Detection of Subterranean Threat Activity in Hard Rock Environments," Role: Co-PI, Amount: $2,998,647.46, Period: Feb. 1, 2024 - Jan. 31, 2026. PI: Dr. Greg Michaelson and other Co-PI: Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay, Dr. Mehdi Esmaeilpour.
ERDC Grant, "Automatic Assessment and Repair for Military Railroads," Role: Co-PI, Amount: $2,050,000.00, Period: Feb. 1, 2024 - Jan. 31, 2026. PI: Dr. Ammar Alzarrad and other Co-PI: Dr. Haroon Malik, Dr. Husnu Narman, Dr. Sudipta Chowdhury, Dr. Greg Michaelson, Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay .
Several research assistant positions are available for these two projects. More details are referred to Team
Our paper is accepted by ACC 2024 - 01/22/2024
Our paper is accepted by ACC 2024 - 01/22/2024
Pingping Zhu, Chang Liu, and Peter Estephan, "A Novel Multivariate Skew-Normal Mixture Model and Its Application in Path-Planning for Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems," American Control Conference (ACC), 2024, Toronto, CAN.
Dr. Zhu is awarded the NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/20/2023
Dr. Zhu is awarded the NASA WV EPSCoR Seed Grant - 04/20/2023
Dr. Zhu's research project, entitled "Centralized-Decentralized-Hybrid Control for Multi-Scale Robotic Spatial Exploration Systems," was funded by the NASA West Virginia Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Seed Grant in the amount of $21,868.
Dr. Zhu is the solo PI for this one-year project from June 1, 2023 to May 31, 2024.
Peter Estephan defended his thesis - 03/20/2023
Peter Estephan defended his thesis - 03/20/2023
My Master student, Peter Estephan, defended his thesis, "A Path Planning Framework for Multi-Agent Robotic Systems Based On Multivariate Skew-Normal Distributions."
Our paper is accepted by IEEE PAMI - 11/16/2022
Our paper is accepted by IEEE PAMI - 11/16/2022
Keith LeGrand, Pingping Zhu, Silvia Ferrari, "Cell Multi-Bernoulli (Cell-MB) Sensor Control for Multi-object Search-While-Tracking (SWT)," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
Dr. Zhu was awarded the John Marshall Scholar Award Spring 2023.
Dr. Zhu was awarded the John Marshall Scholar Award Spring 2023.
Dr. Zhu was selected as one of the two awardees in this University-wide John Marshall Scholar for Spring 2023.
The award consists of a four-course reassigned time commitment to pursue the project.
Project title: An Adaptive Distributed Optimal Control for Decentralized Very-Large-Scale-Robotic Systems
Two of our papers are accepted by IEEE IJCNN 2022 - 04/26/2022
Two of our papers are accepted by IEEE IJCNN 2022 - 04/26/2022
Pingping Zhu, Jose Principe, "Kernel Nonlinear Dynamic System Identification Based on Expectation-Maximization Method," IJCNN 2022, accepted.
Hengye Yang, Joy Putney, Usama Bin Sikandar, Pingping Zhu, Simon Sponberg, Silvia Ferrari, "Regression-based Spike Train Decoding in a Comprehensive Motor Program for Insect Flight," IJCNN 2022, accepted.
Our paper is submitted to IEEE TNNLS - 10/12/2021
Our paper is submitted to IEEE TNNLS - 10/12/2021
Chang Liu, Pingping Zhu, and Silvia Ferrari, "Analysis and Optimization of Sampling Times for Learning Spatio-Temporal Processes Modeled by Gaussian Processes," IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, submitted
Our paper is accepted by IEEE GLOBECOM 2021 - 8/16/2021
Our paper is accepted by IEEE GLOBECOM 2021 - 8/16/2021
Cong Pu and Pingping Zhu, "Defending against Flooding Attacks in the Internet of Drones Environment," IEEE GLOBECOM 2021, accepted.
Our paper is submitted to IEEE PAMI - 8/16/2021
Our paper is submitted to IEEE PAMI - 8/16/2021
Keith LeGrand, Pingping Zhu, and Silvia Ferrari, "Cell Multi-Bernoulli (Cell-MB) Sensor Control for Multi-object Search-While-Tracking (SWT)," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, submitted.
Our paper is accepted by FUSION 2021 conference - 8/2/2021
Our paper is accepted by FUSION 2021 conference - 8/2/2021
Keith LeGrand, Pingping Zhu and Silvia Ferrari, "A Random Finite Set Sensor Control Approach for Vision-based Multi-object Search-While-Tracking," FUSION 2021, accepted.
Our paper is published on IEEE TCNS - 7/14/2021
Our paper is published on IEEE TCNS - 7/14/2021
Zhu, Pingping, Chang Liu, and Silvia Ferrari. "Adaptive online distributed optimal control of very-large-scale robotic systems." IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems 8, no. 2 (2021): 678-689, available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9484757
Our paper is accepted by IEEE TCNS - 7/4/2021
Our paper is accepted by IEEE TCNS - 7/4/2021
Pingping Zhu, Chang Liu, Silvia Ferrari, "Adaptive Online Distributed Optimal Control of Very-Large-Scale Robotic Systems," IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, accepted, 2021.
Capstone project team won the Awards - 4/1/2021
Capstone project team won the Awards - 4/1/2021
Awards:
The Capstone project team won the Research Scholars Award at Marshall University, grant $250, 2021
2nd Place Award in Annual CS Symposium on Emerging Technologies (CSSET) 2021, held by the Department of Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering at Marshall University
Capstone team members:
Thomas M. Williams, Caleb Jonson, Bailey Protzman, Peter J. Mills
Dylan Lester won the Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Fall 2025 - 04/15/2024
Dylan Lester won the Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Fall 2025 - 04/15/2024
Dylan Lester is an undergrad student in our lab. His proposal, titled "A Reinforcement Learning-based Algorithm for Labeled Data Generation," was awarded the Marshall University Creative Discovery and Research Award for Fall 2025 of $1,750 + $750 (for faculty mentor).
The details of this grant can be found here.
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