Principal Investigator

  

Dr. Brendan Englot received S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, 2009 and 2012, respectively. At MIT, he studied path planning for surveillance and inspection applications, deploying his algorithms on an underwater inspection robot that was produced in quantity for the US Navy. Brendan joined Stevens in Fall 2014 from the United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator in the Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (AIRLab) and a technical contributor to the Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft (SARA). While at United Technologies, Brendan was also a part-time lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University, where he taught mechatronics in 2013 and 2014. Brendan is the recipient of a 2017 NSF CAREER award. In 2018, he was appointed the Geoffrey S. Inman Endowed Junior Professor of Mechanical Engineering. (Link to Stevens faculty webpage)


Ph.D. Students


   

Fanfei Chen, also known as Frankie, received a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Design, Manufacturing and Automation from Tongji Zhejiang College in 2014, and a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2015. His research interests include autonomous exploration and robot localization and mapping.







    

Yin Chen received dual Bachelor's Degrees in Materials Science and Engineering and Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2005, and an Ordnance Engineering Certificate also from Stevens in 2008. She is a senior Research Aerospace Engineer for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Armament Center, co-located with the Armament Graduate School where she is a faculty member teaching Systems Theory and Exterior Ballistics. Her research interests are in reconfigurable robotic motion mechanisms.


  

Yewei Huang received a Bachelor's Degree in Geographic Information Systems from Tongji University in 2016, and a Master's Degree in Surveying and Mapping from the same institution in 2019. Her research interests include robot localization and mapping and its application to autonomous driving.






   

John Martin received two Bachelors Degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park; one in Physics and the other in Aerospace Engineering. Before joining Stevens, he worked for Sikorsky Aircraft as a lead contributor on the Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft (SARA), S-97 Raider, and DARPA X-plane. He is a Department of Homeland Security Doctoral Fellow. His research interests are in Reinforcement Learning primarily, with application to Bayesian non-parametrics, deep representations, and of course robotics.








  

John McConnell received his Bachelors from SUNY Maritime College in Mechanical Engineering in 2015. Before joining Stevens, John worked as an engineer offshore Alaska for ExxonMobil. John also worked as a software engineer for Duro UAS, an autonomous underwater vehicle company focused on bridge scour inspection. His primary research interest is utilizing autonomous vehicles for infrastructure inspection, search & rescue and operating in harsh environments.





  

Erik Pearson received two Bachelor's Degrees, the first in Mechanical Engineering and the second in Mathematics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to arriving at Stevens he worked for a year at a start-up called NVBots building 3D printers. His research interests include sensing, control systems and optimization for multi-agent systems performing autonomous surveillance, exploration and inspection tasks.








Tixiao_Photo   

Tixiao Shan received a Master's Degree in Mechatronics from Shanghai University in 2014 and a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering and Automation from Qingdao University in 2011. He is a Stevens Institute of Technology Innovation and Entrepeneurship Doctoral Fellow. His research involves robot motion planning and control, currently focusing on multi-objective planning with application to unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).







   

Jinkun Wang received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei in 2014. His research, supported by the National Robotics Initiative and an ABS Scholarship, currently focuses on 3D mapping and exploration for UUVs.







Masters Students


   


Helen Walter-Cardinal received a Bachelor's degree in Physics (while minoring in Mechanical Engineering) from Sorbonne Université in Paris, France in 2018. She is the recipient of a graduate student research assistantship award through the Maritime Security Center and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the improvement of the autonomous navigation of the BlueROV2 for the purpose of underwater infrastructure inspection.





Undergraduate Students


   

Paul Szenher is majoring in Computer Engineering. He is a recipient of the Stevens Presidential Scholarship and the FIRST Robotics Scholarship. He was a Pinnacle Scholars Summer Research Assistant for 2017, and continues to focus on LIDAR-based 3D map generation and interpretation, including the detection and tracking of moving objects.









Alumni 

 

Nicholas Haliscak - Master of Science in Maritime Systems (with Thesis) - January 2016 - Now at Redstone Arsenal
Nathaniel Goldfarb - Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering (with Thesis) - May 2016 - Now at WPI
 Ronnie Ankner - Stevens Pinnacle Scholar Summer Research Assistant, 2016
 Matthew Foerst - Stevens Pinnacle Scholar Summer Research Assistant, 2016
 Lice Zhang - ME800 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Master's Project, 2016
 Xiangyu Xu - ME800 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Master's Project, 2017 - Now in Stevens' C.S. Ph.D. Program
 Kyle Alvarado - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 James Fredericks - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 Mathew Green - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 Victoria Kapp - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 Anthony Orrico - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 Max Panoff - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2017
 Dengwei Gao - Visiting PhD Student, 2015-2017 - Now at Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi'an, China)
 Kevin Doherty - Bachelor of Engineering in EE (with Thesis) - May 2017 - Now at MIT-WHOI Joint Ph.D. Program
 Sarah Bertussi - Stevens Pinncale Scholar Summer Research Assistant, 2017
 Xiaoyu Zhu - ME800 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Master's Project, 2018
 Dr. Shi Bai - Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering - May 2018 - Now an Applied Scientist at Amazon Lab126
 Gregoire Caubel - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Anthony Donatelli - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Victoria Kapp - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Naomi Kroyer - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Christopher Slappich - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Asif Uddin - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Joshua Zeitlinger - Maritime Security Center Summer Research Institute (SRI) Program Participant, 2018
 Sumukh Patil - ME800 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Master's Project, 2018 - Now at Duro UAS
 Nathan Smith - ME401 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Undergraduate Research Project, 2018
 Hui Zhang - ME800 (Special Problems in Mech. Eng.) Master's Project, 2018 - Now at Bosch China
 Michal Lyskawinski - Master of Science in Computer Science - May 2019
 Justin Sitler - Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering (with Thesis) - May 2019 - Now in Stevens' M.E. Ph.D. Program
 Dong Cui - Visiting PhD Student, 2017-2019 - Now at Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi'an, China)