• The Advanced Control Systems Lab
  • ACSL flight stack
  • Software and flight testing
  • Research and education

The Advanced Control Systems Lab

The Advanced Control Systems Lab (ACSL) is the research group where my students, collaborators, and I develop new control theory and translate it into working robotic systems and open-source software. Our work connects robust adaptive control, optimal control, hybrid systems, machine learning, and autonomous robotics.

ACSL is built around the idea that strong theoretical research and careful implementation should reinforce one another. We test our ideas on aerial and ground robots, develop software that can be reused by the community, and train students to move confidently between mathematics, computation, experimentation, and engineering practice.

Featured Software

ACSL flight stack

ACSL Flight Stack and Software Ecosystem

The ACSL software ecosystem is our main open-source platform for designing, tuning, simulating, and flying advanced nonlinear control systems for autonomous aerial vehicles.

Visit ACSLStack.com Flight stack on GitHub
Multi-rotor and winged UAV software

High-Fidelity Simulator for Multi-Rotor UAVs

The ACSL simulator supports high-fidelity numerical studies of multi-rotor UAV dynamics and control. It is designed to help researchers test control algorithms in challenging scenarios before experiments.

Simulator on GitHub

Additional and Legacy Codes

Older ACSL codes are still useful as instructional examples and historical references, but they are listed here more compactly.

Current Students

Graduate Students

Sorted by degree and then alphabetically.

  • Duy Anh Do ISE — Ph.D. Student
  • Xavier Casanova Pabon ISE — Ph.D. Student, co-advised with Prof. T. Topcu
  • Giri Mugundan Kumar ME — Ph.D. Student
  • Mattia di Mauro AE — M.S. Student at Polytechnic of Milan, co-advised with Prof. F. Braghin
  • Shengyuan Niu ME — Ph.D. Student, co-advised with Prof. A. Kurdila
  • Barr Schlagman ME — M.S. Student, co-advised with Prof. C. Sandu
  • Luca Marchiano Mechatronics — M.S. Student at Polytechnic of Turin, co-advised with Prof. E. Capello

Undergraduate Students

Sorted alphabetically.

  • Edison Melendez ISE
  • Colleen Piccolo ME
  • Siddesh Podder ME

Alumni and Past Researchers

Ph.D. Alumni
  1. Mattia Gramuglia — Ph.D. in ME at Virginia Tech
  2. Haoran Wang — Ph.D. in ME at VT, co-advised with Prof. A. J. Kurdila
  3. Luca Nanu — Ph.D. in AE at Polytechnic of Turin, co-advised with Prof. A. Lerro
  4. Hannah White — Ph.D. in ME at VT, DoD SMART Scholar, co-advised with Prof. C. Sandu
  5. Jyotirmoy Mukherjee — Ph.D. in ME at VT, co-advised with Prof. C. Sandu
  6. Julius A. Marshall — Ph.D. in ISE at VT, DoD SMART Scholar
  7. Robert B. Anderson — Ph.D. in ISE at VT
M.S. Alumni
  1. Shardul Amrite — M.S. in ME at Virginia Tech
  2. Timothy A. Blackford — M.S. in AE at the University of Oklahoma
  3. Paul Binder — M.S. in AE at VT
  4. John-Paul P. Burke — M.S. in AE at OU
  5. Grant I. Carter — M.S. in ME at VT
  6. Rishabh Chaure — M.S. in ME at VT
  7. Coleton Domann — M.S. in AE at OU
  8. Sean E. Eagen — M.S. in ME at VT
  9. Joshua Karinshak — M.S. in ME at OU
  10. Christopher H. Miller — M.S. in ME at VT
  11. Soni Ravi — M.S. in ECE at OU
  12. Brian P. Scurlock — M.S. in ME at VT, co-advised with Prof. A. Kurdila
  13. Japnit Sethi — M.Eng. in ECE at VT
  14. Hudson C. Smith — M.S. Student at VT/TU Darmstadt, co-advised with Prof. D. Clever
Former Post-Docs and Selected Undergraduate Alumni

Collaborators

The following faculty collaborators appear as coauthors in my publications and represent the cross-disciplinary nature of ACSL research.