Ioannis (Yiannis) Kantaros

Ioannis (Yiannis) Kantaros

Assistant Professor

Electrical & Systems Engineering

Education

PhD, Duke University, 2018
MS, Duke University, 2017
Diploma (MS), University of Patras, Greece, 2012

Expertise

Designs safe and distributed autonomy algorithms for large-scale multi-robot systems

Research

His research is focused on enabling safe, robust and distributed autonomy for robotic systems, such as drones and autonomous cars. His work seeks to understand how teams of robots need to coordinate and use their heterogeneous sensing capabilities to safely accomplish complex missions in unknown environments in the presence of sensing and perceptual uncertainty. He has designed safe reinforcement learning algorithms and perception-based control frameworks that constitute the first formal bridge between Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods and mission planning and control allowing large-scale robot teams to safely operate in unknown environments in the presence of perceptual and environmental uncertainty.

Biography

Yiannis Kantaros joins the McKelvey School of Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer & Information Science. He received the outstanding dissertation research award from the Duke Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science in 2018 and a variety of other awards and scholarships. He has been a coauthor on 16 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 conference papers. He will join the faculty Jan. 1, 2022.