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
Petros T.
Boufounos
Hongtao
Qiao
Chungwei
Lin
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Purnanand
Elango
Yanting
Ma
Alexander
Schperberg
Abraham
Goldsmith
Diego
Romeres
Pedro
Miraldo
Philip V.
Orlik
Arvind
Raghunathan
Pu
(Perry)
Wang
William S.
Yerazunis
Vedang M.
Deshpande
Jianlin
Guo
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Kieran
Parsons
Joshua
Rapp
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 University of Padua and MERL team wins the AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS24 Date: October 17, 2024
Awarded to: Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
The competition and award ceremony was hosted by IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) on October 17, 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Diego Romeres presented the team's method, based on a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm called MC-PILCO.
- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
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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.
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News & Events
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NEWS MERL Researchers at NeurIPS 2025 presented 2 conference papers, 5 workshop papers, and organized a workshop. Date: December 2, 2025 - December 7, 2025
Where: San Diego
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Christopher R. Laughman; Suhas Anand Lohit; Pedro Miraldo; Saviz Mowlavi; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Pu (Perry) Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.
Main Conference Papers:
1) Sorachi Kato, Ryoma Yataka, Pu Wang, Pedro Miraldo, Takuya Fujihashi, and Petros Boufounos, "RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer", Code available at: https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-pose-transformer
2) Runyu Zhang, Arvind Raghunathan, Jeff Shamma, and Na Li, "Constrained Optimization From a Control Perspective via Feedback Linearization"
Workshop Papers:
1) Yuyou Zhang, Radu Corcodel, Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, and Ding Zhao, "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", NeuriIPS 2025 Workshop on SPACE in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI (SpaVLE) (Best Paper Runner-up)
2) Xiaoyu Xie, Saviz Mowlavi, and Mouhacine Benosman, "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)
3) Spencer Hutchinson, Abraham Vinod, François Germain, Stefano Di Cairano, Christopher Laughman, and Ankush Chakrabarty, "Quantile-SMPC for Grid-Interactive Buildings with Multivariate Temporal Fusion Transformers", Workshop on UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities (UrbanAI)
4) Yuki Shirai, Kei Ota, Devesh Jha, and Diego Romeres, "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Worskhop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
5) Mark Van der Merwe and Devesh Jha, "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
Workshop Organized:
MERL members co-organized the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips25/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce AI Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.
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NEWS Abraham Vinod Delivers Invited Talks at The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Dallas Date: November 11, 2025 - November 13, 2025
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher Abraham Vinod was invited to present MERL's latest research at the University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Dallas this November. His talk discussed a tractable set-based method for a broad class of robust control problems with nonlinear dynamics and bounded uncertainty, with applications to powered descent guidance and drone motion planning problems. Additionally, he also presented MERL's recent research on environmental monitoring using hetereogenous robots, with applications in disaster management and search-and-rescue.
See All News & Events for Dynamical Systems -
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Internships
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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
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OR0248: Internship - Hybrid AC and DC Power Grids
See All Internships for Dynamical Systems -
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Openings
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CA0093: Research Scientist - Control for Autonomous Systems
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MS0268: Research Scientist - Multiphysical Systems
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "A dual ensemble Kalman filter approach to robust control of nonlinear systems: An application to partial differential equations", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-172 PDF
- @inproceedings{Joshi2025dec,
- author = {Joshi, Anant and Mowlavi, Saviz and Benosman, Mouhacine},
- title = {{A dual ensemble Kalman filter approach to robust control of nonlinear systems: An application to partial differential equations}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-172}
- }
- , "Motion Planning for Information Acquisition via Continuous-time Successive Convexification", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-170 PDF
- @inproceedings{Uzun2025dec,
- author = {Uzun, Samet and Acikmese, Behcet and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Motion Planning for Information Acquisition via Continuous-time Successive Convexification}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-170}
- }
- , "Set-based lossless convexification for a class of robust nonlinear optimal control problems", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-160 PDF
- @inproceedings{Vinod2025dec,
- author = {Vinod, Abraham P. and Kamath, Abhinav and Weiss, Avishai and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Set-based lossless convexification for a class of robust nonlinear optimal control problems}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-160}
- }
- , "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-166 PDF
- @inproceedings{Xie2025dec,
- author = {{{Xie, Xiaoyu and Mowlavi, Saviz and Benosman, Mouhacine}}},
- title = {{{Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization}}},
- booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-166}
- }
- , "Application of Optimal Control to Time-Resolution Protocol for Quantum Sensing", Physical Review, November 2025.BibTeX TR2025-161 PDF
- @article{Lin2025nov,
- author = {Lin, Chungwei and Ding, Qi (Andy) and Ma, Yanting},
- title = {{Application of Optimal Control to Time-Resolution Protocol for Quantum Sensing}},
- journal = {Physical Review},
- year = 2025,
- month = nov,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-161}
- }
- , "Energy-constrained multi-robot exploration for autonomous map building", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2025.BibTeX TR2025-131 PDF
- @inproceedings{Karumanchi2025oct,
- author = {Karumanchi, Sambhu and Rokaha, Bhagawan and Schperberg, Alexander and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Energy-constrained multi-robot exploration for autonomous map building}},
- booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
- year = 2025,
- month = oct,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-131}
- }
- , "Energy-Efficient Motion Planner for Legged Robots", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 2025.BibTeX TR2025-151 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Schperberg2025oct,
- author = {Schperberg, Alexander and Menner, Marcel and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Energy-Efficient Motion Planner for Legged Robots}},
- booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
- year = 2025,
- month = oct,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-151}
- }
- , "Optimal Measurement Projection in GNSS-RTK Factor Graph Optimization", IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), DOI: 10.1109/CCTA53793.2025.11151373, August 2025.BibTeX TR2025-118 PDF
- @inproceedings{Hu2025aug,
- author = {Hu, Yingjie and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Berntorp, Karl},
- title = {{Optimal Measurement Projection in GNSS-RTK Factor Graph Optimization}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = aug,
- doi = {10.1109/CCTA53793.2025.11151373},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-118}
- }
- , "A dual ensemble Kalman filter approach to robust control of nonlinear systems: An application to partial differential equations", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.
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Videos
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