Dynamical Systems
Exploiting nonlinearity and shaping dynamics in creative and deeply mathematical ways.
We apply dynamical systems theory in applications ranging from space probe trajectory optimization to elevator suspensions. We also develop fundamental theory and computational methods in fluid dynamics.
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Researchers
Stefano
Di Cairano
Avishai
Weiss
Yebin
Wang
Abraham P.
Vinod
Scott A.
Bortoff
Saviz
Mowlavi
Christopher R.
Laughman
Hassan
Mansour
Purnanand
Elango
Petros T.
Boufounos
Hongtao
Qiao
Chungwei
Lin
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Alexander
Schperberg
Yanting
Ma
Abraham
Goldsmith
Jordan
Leung
Nobuyuki
Yoshikawa
Pedro
Miraldo
Philip V.
Orlik
Arvind
Raghunathan
Joshua
Rapp
Kento
Tomita
Pu
(Perry)
Wang
William S.
Yerazunis
Wael H.
Ali
Vedang M.
Deshpande
Jianlin
Guo
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Kieran
Parsons
Hongbo
Sun
Bingnan
Wang
Jinyun
Zhang
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Awards
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AWARD MERL intern and Researchers wins 2025 IEEE CCTA Best Student Paper Award Date: August 27, 2025
Awarded to: Yingjie Hu (Student, Intern), Karl Berntorp, Stefano Di Cairano (MERL Researchers)
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Signal ProcessingBrief- MERL intern Yingjie Hu was recognized as the winner of the 2025 IEEE CCTA Best Student Paper Award for the paper "Optimal Measurement Projection in GNSS-RTK Factor Graph Optimization" written in collaboration with MERL Researchers Karl Berntorp and Stefano Di Cairano during the internship at MERL
The paper develops methods for measurement projections for reducing the computational burden of factor graph optimization algorithms in GNSS applications, thus enabling their use in real-time in a wider range of positioning applications.
The IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Application is the conference of the IEEE Control Systems Society focused on applications and technological advances of control systems
- MERL intern Yingjie Hu was recognized as the winner of the 2025 IEEE CCTA Best Student Paper Award for the paper "Optimal Measurement Projection in GNSS-RTK Factor Graph Optimization" written in collaboration with MERL Researchers Karl Berntorp and Stefano Di Cairano during the internship at MERL
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AWARD MERL’s Paper on Wi-Fi Sensing Earns Top 3% Paper Recognition at ICASSP 2023, Selected as a Best Student Paper Award Finalist Date: June 9, 2023
Awarded to: Cristian J. Vaca-Rubio, Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Petros Boufounos and Petar Popovski
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal ProcessingBrief- A MERL Paper on Wi-Fi sensing was recognized as a Top 3% Paper among all 2709 accepted papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023). Co-authored by Cristian Vaca-Rubio and Petar Popovski from Aalborg University, Denmark, and MERL researchers Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Petros Boufounos, the paper "MmWave Wi-Fi Trajectory Estimation with Continous-Time Neural Dynamic Learning" was also a Best Student Paper Award finalist.
Performed during Cristian’s stay at MERL first as a visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and then as a full-time intern in 2022, this work capitalizes on standards-compliant Wi-Fi signals to perform indoor localization and sensing. The paper uses a neural dynamic learning framework to address technical issues such as low sampling rate and irregular sampling intervals.
ICASSP, a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), was hosted on the Greek island of Rhodes from June 04 to June 10, 2023. ICASSP 2023 marked the largest ICASSP in history, boasting over 4000 participants and 6128 submitted papers, out of which 2709 were accepted.
- A MERL Paper on Wi-Fi sensing was recognized as a Top 3% Paper among all 2709 accepted papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023). Co-authored by Cristian Vaca-Rubio and Petar Popovski from Aalborg University, Denmark, and MERL researchers Pu Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Petros Boufounos, the paper "MmWave Wi-Fi Trajectory Estimation with Continous-Time Neural Dynamic Learning" was also a Best Student Paper Award finalist.
See All Awards for MERL -
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News & Events
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NEWS MERL researchers present 9 papers at IEEE ICRA 2026 Date: June 1, 2026 - June 5, 2026
Where: Vienna, Austria
MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Purnanand Elango; Siddarth Jain; Alexander Schperberg; Kento Tomita
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers presented nine papers at the recently concluded IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria. The papers covered a broad set of topics in robotics, including robot perception, visuo-tactile sensing, contact and pose estimation, manipulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, loco-manipulation, contact-implicit trajectory optimization, legged locomotion, localization, and perception-aware planning.
IEEE ICRA is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts nearly 8,000 participants and receives more than 5,000 paper submissions.
- MERL researchers presented nine papers at the recently concluded IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria. The papers covered a broad set of topics in robotics, including robot perception, visuo-tactile sensing, contact and pose estimation, manipulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, loco-manipulation, contact-implicit trajectory optimization, legged locomotion, localization, and perception-aware planning.
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NEWS MERL researchers present 8 papers at ACC 2026 Date: May 26, 2026 - May 29, 2026
Where: New Orleans, USA
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Vedang M. Deshpande; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Jordan Leung; Hongtao Qiao; Zhaolin Ren; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers presented 8 papers at the recently concluded American Control Conference (ACC) 2026 in New Orleans, USA. The papers covered a wide range of topics including robust controllable set computation, vapor compression cycle calibration, task-reasoning LLM agents, Minkowski-cost stable MPC, polynomial chaos approximation, invariant-set motion planning, heat-pump MPC architectures, and relaxed barrier-function MPC. Additionally, Zhaolin Ren was an invited speaker at Multi-Agent Dynamic Games workshop, and Abraham Vinod served as a panelist at the Professional Development and Career Advice for Young Professionals session.
As a sponsor of the conference, MERL maintained a booth for open discussions with researchers and students, and hosted a special session to discuss highlights of MERL research and work philosophy.
- MERL researchers presented 8 papers at the recently concluded American Control Conference (ACC) 2026 in New Orleans, USA. The papers covered a wide range of topics including robust controllable set computation, vapor compression cycle calibration, task-reasoning LLM agents, Minkowski-cost stable MPC, polynomial chaos approximation, invariant-set motion planning, heat-pump MPC architectures, and relaxed barrier-function MPC. Additionally, Zhaolin Ren was an invited speaker at Multi-Agent Dynamic Games workshop, and Abraham Vinod served as a panelist at the Professional Development and Career Advice for Young Professionals session.
See All News & Events for Dynamical Systems -
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Internships
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CA0283: Internship - Active SLAM for Aerial Robots
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CA0153: Internship - High-Fidelity Visualization and Simulation for Space Applications
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MS0254: Internship - Decentralized Data Assimilation for Large Scale Systems
See All Internships for Dynamical Systems -
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Openings
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MS0268: Research Scientist - Multiphysical Systems
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SA0297: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - AI for Science
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy", ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling, July 2026.BibTeX TR2026-096 PDF
- @inproceedings{Bhaskar2026jul,
- author = {Bhaskar, Amisha and Tokekar, Pratap and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Schperberg, Alexander},
- title = {{MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy}},
- booktitle = {ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference \& Generative Modeling},
- year = 2026,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-096}
- }
- , "Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2026.BibTeX TR2026-101 PDF
- @inproceedings{Folorunsho2026jul,
- author = {Folorunsho, Samuel and Hayner, Christopher and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones}},
- booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-101}
- }
- , "Data-driven Spatial Classification using Multi-Arm Bandits for Monitoring with Energy-Constrained Mobile Robots", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-078 PDF Video
- @article{Lin2026jun,
- author = {Lin, Xiaoshan and Nayak, Siddharth and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Data-driven Spatial Classification using Multi-Arm Bandits for Monitoring with Energy-Constrained Mobile Robots}},
- journal = {IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-078}
- }
- , "GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-068 PDF
- @inproceedings{Buckner2026jun,
- author = {Buckner, Samuel and Elango, Purnanand},
- title = {{GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-068}
- }
- , "Safe Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Combined Model and Learning-based Control", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-072 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Schperberg2026jun,
- author = {Schperberg, Alexander and Wang, Yeping and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Safe Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Combined Model and Learning-based Control}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-072}
- }
- , "LIDIA: Localizing In the Dark with Illumination-Awareness toward Perception-Aware Planning", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-071 PDF
- @inproceedings{Velentzas2026jun,
- author = {{Velentzas, I.G. and Tomita, K.}},
- title = {{LIDIA: Localizing In the Dark with Illumination-Awareness toward Perception-Aware Planning}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-071}
- }
- , "Invariant-set motion-planner for unicycle dynamics under closed-loop feedback linearization", American Control Conference (ACC), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-064 PDF
- @inproceedings{Leung2026may2,
- author = {Leung, Jordan and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Invariant-set motion-planner for unicycle dynamics under closed-loop feedback linearization}},
- booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-064}
- }
- , "A set-based approach for stable MPC with Minkowski cost functions", American Control Conference (ACC), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-062 PDF
- @inproceedings{Leung2026may,
- author = {Leung, Jordan and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{A set-based approach for stable MPC with Minkowski cost functions}},
- booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-062}
- }
- , "MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy", ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling, July 2026.
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Videos
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Software & Data Downloads
