Students

Current Members





Zichao Hou (Ph.D candidate, 2018-present )

Zichao, who prefers to be called Chao as in the Italian word "Ciao", is a MS student in the Lab since 2018 summer.

He takes over Evan's job, working on robot SLAM problems. Thanks to Evan's years' great work, Zichao could reach further in academic. Besides the lab work, Zichao performs good in course work. He maintains his GPA at 4.0/4.0 from his very first semester in GW to now.

Other than study, Zichao plays ultimate frisbee with GW's men's team. He also would like to spend time in art museum in DC during weekends.

LinkedIn for Zichao Hou




Tejaswi K. C. (Ph.D candidate, 2019-present )

Tejaswi became a member of the lab in Fall 2019 after completing his undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering from India.

He loves to think about the challenging aspects of aerial robotic dynamics and control, within which he believes in obtaining inspiration from nature. Outside research, he enjoys the simple pleasures of books, sports and outdoor adventures.




Beomyeol Yu (Ph.D student, 2021-present )

Beomyeol, called Ben, joined FDCL in Spring 2021. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Chungnam National University, South Korea.

His research focuses on the field of aerial robotics and reinforcement learning, with particular interest in low-level control of quadcopters transporting payloads.

GitHub




Maneesha Wickramasuriya (Ph.D student, 2020-present)

Maneesha joined the lab as in Summer 2021 and doing research in Object Detection and Image Segmentation using Deep computer vision techniques. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

GitHub: ManeeshW




Karl Simon (Undergraduate student, 2022-present)

Karl joined the lab in Fall 2022, and is pursuing a B.S in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics.

He is interested in applying concepts of machine learning and computer vision to control quadcopters, and is beginning work on an autonomous drone racing project.

GitHub






Former Members





Weixin Wang (Ph.D, 2019-2022 )

Weixin joined the lab in January 2019. He got his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University in China, and his master's degree form University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. He has been working on two projects: uncertainty propagation for hybrid stochastic systems, and the matrix Fisher-Gaussian distribution for IMU orientation and robot pose estimation.

He also wrote a tutorial of IMU attitude estimation in Chinese (Link).




Kanishke Gamagedara (Ph.D, 2016-2022)

Kanishke joined the lab as a master's student in Spring 2016 and continued his studies as a Ph.D. student upon graduation. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

He joined the ship air-wake measurement project where he designed data collection systems for an octocopter and a fixed wing aircraft. He likes to brag about these data systems which survived and did their job amidst many "unplanned sea landings" of the UAVs.

He loves working with hardware and has experiences on RTK GPS systems, microcontrollers, single board computers, and PCB design.

GitHub: kanishkegb




Allegra Farrar (BS, 2018-2020)




Mahdis Bisheban, Ph.D (2015-2018)




Noah Curtiss, BS (2017-2019)




Carolyn Fisk, BS (2017-2019)




Evan Kaufman, Ph.D (2012-2018)




Shankar Kulumani, Ph.D (2014-2018)

Shankar is an example of taking the "road less traveled".

A graduate of both the US Air Force Academy and Purdue University, Shankar left the military as a Captain to join academia as a lowly graduate student. He now spends his days cycling, attending to his cats, and espousing the virtues of Vim to whoever can bear to listen.

In his free time he enjoys looking at ways to apply geometric mechanics and control to spacecraft operations around asteroids.

https://shankarkulumani.com




Chris Poole, BS (2015-2018)

Chris joined the lab, after being recommended by Evan, who enthusiastically described him as a brilliant undergraduate student who figured out all of tricks in his CAD class.

It turned out... Chris was brilliant!

He mastered ALL of tools and skills in robotics, including coding, circuit design, and tricky surface mounting. He took the lead in various cool projects, and contributed to solve numerous technical issues in the lab.

He will join Raytheon from summer 2018, and if we get lucky, he will come back as a MS student.




Kuya Takami, Ph.D. (postdoc, 2016-2017)

Kuya received his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2015, before joining FDCL in 2016 to participate in the NRL project regarding autonomous exploration.

Beyond his critical contributions to the project, he introduced various computational tools and cultures in robotics, including ROS and git, to the lab. He also demonstrated Japanese craftsmanship by building a quadrotor that survived multiple dozen crashes!

And, he is another serious cyclist; fun to be around.

Currently, he is a scientific software developer at Enthought in Austin TX, contributing innovative thinking to robotics perception and human-robot interaction (coped from the company homepage).




Kalpesh Patil, MS (2015-2017)

Kalpesh became a member of the lab, after describing his UAV project in India... like a boss.

He contributed significantly to the initial phase of the ONR project, by developing the telemetry system and verifying it through a number of underways, i.e., experiments on the deck of the ship.

He is currently an electrical and mechanical engineer at BestPack traveling all around the state. Don't forget to tell us when you are around DC!




Tse-Huai Wu, Ph.D (2013-2015)

Tse-Huai, going by Roy, is the only member who was sitting at Dr. Lee's seminar given when he visited GW for his job interview. Surprisingly enough, he got interested in geometric mechanics and control after the talk, and joined the lab

He was the one who patiently followed every detail of the mathematical development, which doing most abstract research as a student in the lab.

Also, a tough guy, who is now a father of two beautiful daughters, and a husband of a beautiful wife.

He is currently a software engineer at Clear Guide Medical, and he is still enthusiastic about research.




Farhad Goodarzi, Ph.D (2011-2015)

Farhad made significant contributions to the initial development of quadrotor together with Daewon. He was successful in both of theoretical research and flight experiments in autonomous aerial transportation of cable-suspended payloads.

Furthermore, he was always serious in making an exceptional progress regarding progress, productivity, and publication records, thereby making the role of the advisor easier.

He is the technical lead in autonomous vehicle group of Liebherr




Kiren Caldwell, MS (2014-2015)

After completing his undergraduate program, Kiren joined the lab for the five-year program of BS/MS. He is another good programmer, and participated in IMU integration, and GUI developments.

Now, he is a software engineer at Lockheed Martin, enjoying the beauty of the west coast.




Daewon Lee, Ph.D (postdoc, 2012-2014)

Daewon received his doctoral degree from Seoul National University, South Korea, before joining the lab as a postdoctoral scientist. With his extensive backgrounds in UAV experiments, Daewon contributed to the early development of quadrotor, and he is the one who flew a quadrotor successfully at the MOCA lab, for the first time in the lab.

A good engineer who wanted by a good father and husband.

He is a postdoctoral scientist, at the celebrated GRASP lab of the University of Pennsylvania.




Jack Dougherty, MS (2012-2013)

Jack is another brilliant undergraduate student, who completed both of his BS and MS degree in five years.

He was academically successful with the best GPA in the engineering school, and he was exceptional in research as well, completing the laser-guided autonomous landing project within one year. The video summarizing his experiments still impress the audiences when giving a talk.

Talented in photography and happily married to a high school sweetheart. Now, he is a senior engineer at Qualcomm Research, Philadelphia.

http://johnadougherty.com