Usman A. Fiaz

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Autonomy and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with Dr. Edward R. Griffor. I am affiliated with the Smart Connected Systems Division (SCSD) in the Communications Technology Lab (CTL). As a PREP Fellow, I also have a joint appointment with the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and in general, I am part of the NIST-Consortium of the East-Coast PREP-Universities including: Brown, Johns Hopkins, UMD, and some other DC area schools.

    

I obtained my PhD degree in Electrical Engineering (ECE) from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in 2022. During my PhD, I was affiliated with the Maryland Robotics Center (MRC), and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), advised by Prof. John S. Baras. I received my Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from PIEAS in 2015, and Master's degree also in Electrical Engineering, from KAUST in 2017. During my Masters, I was affiliated with the Robotics Intelligent Systems and Control (RISC) Lab, advised by Prof. Jeff S. Shamma.

    

During my graduate and undergraduate studies, I have also spent time with Intel, ABB, Bell Labs, MERL, and CERN, working on several interesting projects.​​

    

Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in some of the modern areas of robotics, control theory, and machine learning with special emphasis on autonomous multiagent systems.

        

More specifically, I'm interested in the following topics:

• ​Assured autonomy in multiagent systems; UAVs in particular

• Autonomous aerial grasping, transport, and surveillance

• Programmable self-assembly and distributed self-reconfiguration

• Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and internet-of-things (IoT)

• Safe planning and control for automated-driving systems (ADS)

• ​Related applications of computer vision, AI, and deep learning​​​

     

Please feel free to contact me, if you would like to talk about my work or discuss something of mutual interest.