Vijay Kumar

Vijay Kumar is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Computer and Information Science, and Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Bachelor of Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
• PhD, The Ohio State University (1987)

Research Interests: Vijay Kumar's work spans robotics, autonomous systems, and machine learning, focusing on trajectories, control, and collaboration. Key subfields include quadrotor dynamics, semantic SLAM, multi-robot coordination, event-based vision, and LLM integration for robotic systems. His research addresses challenges in autonomous flight, resilient control, and agricultural robotics.

Recent Publication Trends: Over the past two years, Kumar's research has emphasized language-specified missions, event camera applications, neural radiance fields, and time-optimal path planning for quadrotors and multi-robot teams. Notable themes include safety guardrails for LLM-powered robots, 4D metric-semantic mapping, and adaptive replanning in dynamic environments.

Scientific Awards:

• Fellow, AAAS (2021)
• Fellow, ASME and IEEE
• ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award (2012)
• IEEE Distinguished Service Award (2012)
• Engelberger Robotics Award (2014)
• IEEE Pioneer Award (2018)
• Elected to National Academy of Engineering (2013), American Philosophical Society (2018), and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022)

Advising and Leadership: Kumar has mentored numerous PhD students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at major robotics conferences. He founded the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab (GRASP) at Penn, which has spun off multiple robotics startups like Exyn Technologies. He has served on editorial boards of leading journals and held advisory roles in national science policy.