lantao AT iu.edu
I am an assistant professor in the Intelligent Systems Engineering Department at Indiana University - Bloomington.
I work on Autonomous Systems and develop solutions in AI and Robotics.
I direct the Vehicle Autonomy and Intelligence Lab (VAIL).
Before joining IU, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California since 2015. I also spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Field Robotics Center of Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I obtained my PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.
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2022-07: Our paper "AK: Attentive Kernel for Information Gathering" is awarded the Best Student Paper Award in RSS2022. Research video.
2022-06: I will serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.
2022-05: Our research on navigation in heavily clustered environment was selected and featured by Clearpath Robotics. See this link.
2022-05: We will be supported by NAVSEA to develop navigation methods that allow AUV/ASV to perform complex inspection tasks in unstructured ocean environments.
2022-04: Two Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) papers were accepted.
2021-11: Recently some of our projects have been featured in the Successful Stories of the Amazon Machine Learning Research Award program.
2021-10: We received grant from U.S. Army Research Lab for the Scalable, Adaptive, and Resilient Autonomy program. We are 1 of 4 teams selected (tegoether with MIT, CMU, and U Washington).
2021-04: VAIL is selected to participate Phase II of Artificial Intelligence for Small Unit Maneuver Prize Challenge organized by Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane.
2021-03: NSF CAREER program will support VAIL on research of autonomous environmental monitoring.
2021-01: Two new PhD students are joining VAIL. Welcome!
2020-11: I will serve on the senior program committee for IJCAI 2021.
2020-06: NSF Robust Intelligence Program will support our project of aquatic vehicle planning in challenging disturbed environments.
2020-06: One Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) paper was accepted.
2020-05: VAIL received grant from U.S. Army Research Lab for research on vehicle autonomy.
2020-04: I received Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Award.
2020-01: I gave a webinar on autonomous water resource monitoring to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
2019-11: Invited talk at this year's IROS workshop on Informed Scientific Sampling in Large-scale Outdoor Environments.
2019-10: VAIL moves to a new lab space newly built at MESH. It includes both a flight arena and a mini-pool for testing various robotic platforms.
2019-09: I helped organize the Indiana National Lab Day one-day workshop at Indianapolis. I also gave a short talk.
2019-08: Will serve as an Associate Editor for International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
2019-06: I chaired a session at this year's RSS, and presented two papers.
2019-06: Gave an invited lecture on autonomous vehicles and robots at award-wining Mini University, with more than 60 senior citizen students.
2019-05: Two Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) papers were accepted.
2018-11: I gave a lecture on self-driving vehicles to IU Continuing Studies where my "students" were all senior people.
2018-08: Four PhD students joined VAIL. Welcome!
2018-07: VAIL gave lab tours and demos to two summer camps: Engineering Tomorrow Summer Camp and WonderCamp.
2018-06: Vehicle Autonomy and Intelligence Lab (VAIL) at IU is established!
2018-05: Three Master students that I supervised at USC graduated. Shouhbik went to Nvidia Robotics group; Yezhen joined AutoX self-driving car startup; and Chen went to MicroSoft NLP group. Congratulations to all!
2017-11: I gave an invited talk on "Environmental Monitoring using Drones" at the 2017 CIS-IEEE EnCON Engineering Conference
2017-08: I started my assistant professorship in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University - Bloomington.
2017-05: Two Master students graduated. Kai-Chieh went to Brain Corp and Zhibei went to TuSimple; both work on self-driving vehicles. Congratulations to both!
2017-04: A few colleagues and I just finished organizing the second Southern California Robotics Symposium (SCR 2017) which was held on the campus of USC. The event was a big success and we had over 300 attendees. There were 15 speakers, 25 accepted posters, and 16 exhibition booths, from both academia and industry.
2016-04: I co-organized the inaugural Southern California Robotics Symposium (SCR 2016) that was held on the campus of UCSD. We achieved a great success, with an amazing line-up of speakers and around 300 participants.