Dr. Nikolay Atanasov

Biography

Nikolay Atanasov joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego in Fall 2016, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. His research interests include robotics, control theory, optimization, computer vision, machine learning, and autonomous information collection. Atanasov's work focuses on controlling teams of aerial and ground robots to collect metric, semantic, and topological information for applications such as environmental monitoring, security surveillance, localization, mapping, and search and rescue. He investigates distributed sensing and estimation to evolve physical processes while planning robot motion to minimize estimation uncertainty and energy expenditure. His contributions to the field have been recognized with the Joseph Rosaline Wolf Award for his Ph.D. dissertation. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Trinity College and a Master of Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Research Interests