Vasileios Tzoumas
Assistant Professor
Location
François-Xavier Bagnoud Aerospace Building
1320 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2140
Personal Pronouns
He/Him/His
Primary Website
Education
University of Pennsylvania
PhD Electrical and Systems Engineering ’18
MS Electrical Engineering ’16
Wharton School of Business – University of Pennsylvania
MA Statistics ’16
National Technical University of Athens
Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering ’12
Teaching
- AEROSP 584 – Navigation and Guidance of Aerospace Vehicles
- AEROSP 740 – Visual Navigation for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles
Research Interests
My team and I research safe learning algorithms that help robots adaptively perceive their surroundings, self-navigate, and collaborate. We care for the robots’ trustworthy collaborative autonomy, focusing on applications where the robots operate (i) in challenging conditions, such as unknown, cluttered, and dynamic environments, and (ii) even in adversarial environments where failures or attackers can take down robots, compromising the robots’ teams.
Professional Service
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
Biography
Vasileios Tzoumas received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (2018). He holds a Master of Arts in Statistics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (2016); a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (2016); and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2012).
Vasileios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Previously, he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), where he was a research scientist (2019-2020), and a post-doctoral associate (2018-2019). Vasileios was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT in 2017.
Vasileios works on control, learning, and perception, as well as combinatorial and distributed optimization, with applications to robotics, cyber-physical systems, and self-reconfigurable aerospace systems. He cares for trustworthy collaborative autonomy. His work includes foundational results on robust and adaptive combinatorial optimization, with applications to multi-robot information gathering for resiliency against robot failures and adversarial removals.
Vasileios is a recipient of the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), of an Honorable Mention from the 2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and was a Best Student Paper Award finalist at the 2017 IEEE Conference in Decision and Control (CDC).
Awards
- Honorable Mention, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020
- Best Paper Award in Robot Vision, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020
- Best Student Paper Award Finalist, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2017
- Interview article “Algorithms that protect” MIT LIDS|ALL Magazine, Vol. 5, 2019
- Best Presentation in Session Award, American Control Conference (ACC), 2016
- Best Presentation in Session Award, American Control Conference (ACC), 2015
