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 Presents Set-Based Reachability Research for Spacecraft Guidance at NASA Johnson Space Center Date: April 15, 2026 - April 16, 2026
Where: NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston
MERL Contacts: Abraham P. Vinod; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers Avishai Weiss and Abraham Vinod visited NASA Johnson Space Center to present recent advances in set-based reachability analysis for spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with an emphasis on powered descent guidance for lunar landing. They delivered an invited talk titled “Safe and Optimal Control for Spacecraft GN&C using Set-Based Reachability Analysis.”
The presentation introduced MERL’s recently developed set-based computational techniques for safe, optimal, and robust spacecraft control, including methods that specialize the approach for computing maximum divert envelopes and enabling real-time landing footprint prediction for landers. The talk was attended by researchers from NASA and the University of Washington, and generated extensive technical discussion.
- MERL researchers Avishai Weiss and Abraham Vinod visited NASA Johnson Space Center to present recent advances in set-based reachability analysis for spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with an emphasis on powered descent guidance for lunar landing. They delivered an invited talk titled “Safe and Optimal Control for Spacecraft GN&C using Set-Based Reachability Analysis.”
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NEWS MERL researcher Abraham Vinod delivers an invited talk at CVXPY workshop 2026 Date: February 20, 2026
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher Abraham Vinod was an invited speaker at the inaugural CVXPY Workshop 2026, held at Stanford University, USA. CVXPY is an open-source, Python-embedded modeling language for convex optimization, and the workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to share ideas and real-world Python-based applications of convex optimization. Abraham’s talk, titled “pycvxset: Convex Sets in Python,” introduced MERL’s recently released open-source toolbox for convex set manipulation to the CVXPY community. The talk highlighted the toolbox’s capabilities and showcased recent applications in autonomous precision landing and robotics. The workshop details are available at https://www.cvxpy.org/workshop/2026/.
See All News & Events for Dynamical Systems -
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Internships
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MS0254: Internship - Decentralized Data Assimilation for Large Scale Systems
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CA0283: Internship - Active SLAM for Aerial Robots
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MS0259: Internship - Multi-Fidelity Dynamic Models for Energy Systems
See All Internships for Dynamical Systems -
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Openings
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SA0297: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - AI for Science
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MS0268: Research Scientist - Multiphysical Systems
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "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, Iason, G and Kento, Tomita},
- 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}
- }
- , "Robust Controllable Set Computation using Constrained Convex Generators", American Control Conference (ACC), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-063 PDF
- @inproceedings{Silvestre2026may,
- author = {Silvestre, Daniel and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Robust Controllable Set Computation using Constrained Convex Generators}},
- booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-063}
- }
- , "Single View Camera-Based Dynamic Airflow Sensing", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-038 PDF
- @inproceedings{Tandi2026may,
- author = {Tandi, Kevin and Ali, Wael H. and Rapp, Joshua and Mansour, Hassan},
- title = {{Single View Camera-Based Dynamic Airflow Sensing}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-038}
- }
- , "OpInf-LLM: Parametric PDE Solving with LLMs via Operator Inference", International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Workshop on AI and Partial Differential Equations (AI&PDE), April 2026.BibTeX TR2026-043 PDF
- @inproceedings{Wang2026apr2,
- author = {Wang, Zhuoyuan and Hu, Hanjiang and Deng, Xiyu and Mowlavi, Saviz and Nakahira, Yorie},
- title = {{OpInf-LLM: Parametric PDE Solving with LLMs via Operator Inference}},
- booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Workshop on AI and Partial Differential Equations (AI\&PDE)},
- year = 2026,
- month = apr,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-043}
- }
- , "GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.
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Videos
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Software & Data Downloads
