"The greatest truths are the simplest.-- Lao Tzu"

News

• 10/2024: I serve on the special issue "Advances in Internet of Drones: Applications, Communication Infrastructures, Architectures, and Protocols for FANETs" of the Journal of Drones MDPI as a guest editor. 

• 09/2024: Oscar L. Gonzalez joined my research group as my second PhD student. He used to be an MS student in my robotics class in Fall 2023.    

• 08/2024: Eric Rodriguez continues his study as my first PhD student.

• 06/2024: Our collaborative research in trustworthy AI for transportation systems received three years of support from the NSF CISE MSI program. 

• 06/2024: Our collaborative research with the AI institute AI4OPT received four years of support from the NSF Expand AI program. 

• 06/2024: Ryan Luna's paper on "Robust Mitigation Strategy for Misleading Pheromone Trails in Foraging Robot Swarms" was accepted to the TAROS robotics conference in London, UK.

• 05/2024: Dr. Qi Lu received the CECS Excellence Faculty Awards in Research and Scholarship.

• 03/2024: My undergraduate student Arturo Gonzalez. His preliminary work was accepted as a poster for the 2024 International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots, in New York, USA.

• 03/2024: My master's students Ryan Luna and Eric Rodriguez's papers were accepted to the 2024 International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots, in New York, USA. 

• 02/2024: My master's student Ryan Luna received the CECS (College of Engineering and Computer Science) Outstanding Graduate Student.

• 02/2024: My undergraduate student Daniel Masamba received the CECS Outstanding Undergraduate Student.

• 02/2024:  Ryan Luna’s work on pheromone-inspired intrusion detection in robot swarms was accepted to the 4th International Conference on Computer, Control, and Robotics. 

• 01/2024: I served on the 2023 USDA NIFA review panel. 

• 12/2023: The masters' students Eric Rodriguez and Ryan Luna’s work on "Particle Swarm Optimization for PID Controllers and Intrusion Detection in Robot Swarms" was accepted to the 7th RGV STEM Education Conference.

• 11/2023: The undergraduate student Daniel Masamba’s poster on “Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Foraging Robots” was accepted by the Gateway to Graduate Studies in Science (G2S2) at the University of Texas at Austin on Nov. 13th, 2023.

• 08/2023: I received the NSF CISE-MSI grant for the "Towards Scalable, Resilient and Robust Foraging with Heterogeneous Robot Swarms" as a PI. The total award is $600,000 for three years. 

• 05/2023: Our lab students present their work and show robot demos for 100 local IDEA 9th-grade public school students in the CS department visit. 

• 04/2023: Our students' work in distributed deterministic spiral search for robot swarms was accepted by the conference on robots and vision (CRV).

• 04/2023: Our lab students present their work and host the lab visit for the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) representatives.  

• 12/2022: I serve as an editor on "Heterogenous Robot Swarms" in the Journal of Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 

• 12/2022: Our project "Nanoscale Foraging and Self-Assembly Swarms" received the UTRGV Faculty Seed Research grant. 

• 11/2022: Our project "Epidemiology-Inspired Foraging Robot Swarms" was nominated by UTRGV as one of only two representatives for the ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards program.

• 09/2022: Our robotics research lab was established and named MARS (Multiple Autonomous Robot Systems). 

• 09/2022: I joined the Department of Computer Science at UTRGV as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.

• 02/17/2022: Congratulations to my first co-supervised Ph.D. student, Dohee Lee, who just passed his Ph.D. thesis defense.  

• 02/07/2022: The work on the Dynamic Multiple-Branch Robot Chains for foraging robot swarms is accepted to the top robotics conference ICRA 2022. See you in Philadelphia on May 23 - 27.

• 06/2021: The work on the Multiple Agent Reinforcement Learning for Foraging Swarm is accepted to [IJCNN 2021].

• 03/2021: The joint work with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST, South Korea) on dynamic robot chains for foraging swarms is accepted to [ICRA 2021].

• 01/2021: The Santa Fe Institute highlights our swarm foraging review paper. [Details] 

• 12/2020: Our US patent on Multiple-Place Swarm Foraging with Dynamic Depots is approved.[Details]

• 08/2020: Our work on Foraging Swarm Robotics is accepted to the Journal of Current Robotics Reports. [Details]

• 05/2020: Our work on Scalable Foraging Robot Swarms is accepted to [ICRA 2020].[Details]

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