Robotics, Optimization, and Controls Laboratory

People

Dr. Logan E. Beaver

Dr. Logan E. Beaver

Principal Investigator

Dr. Beaver is an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at ODU.

Hossein Gholampour

Hossein Gholampour

PhD Student

Hossein is developing compliant control methods for manipulation.

Johan Jallah

Johan Jallah

MS Student

Johan is exploring sparse kernel-based learning in Banach spaces.

Filippos Tzortzoglou

Filippos N. Tzortzoglou

Visiting PhD Student

Filippos is a visiting PhD student designing emerging mobility systems.

Brock Marcinczyk

Brock Marcinczyk

Undergraduate Researcher

Brock is developing physics-based optimal control algorithms.

Bryan Reali

Bryan Reali

Undergraduate Researcher

Bryan is working on collaborative robotic exploration.

Yusef Beitazzam

Yusef Beitazzam

Undergraduate Researcher

Yusef is working on AI-enabled mobile manipulation.

Research Areas

We perform basic and applied research to explore and optimize the fundamental behavior of robotic systems.

UR5e manipulation experimental setup

Compliant Manipulation

We develop algorithms that enable robots to intelligently manipulate unknown objects in unstructured environments.

Collaborator: Sandia National Labs
Robot colony with foraging and idle robots

Swarm-Scale Task Coordination

We develop scaleable algorithms to efficiently allocate robots to tasks in large-scale systems using game theory and mechanism design.

Sponsor: Virginia Space Grant Consortium
Microrobots moving along a substrate

Control of Microrobot Teams

We design control systems for highly underactuated systems that take advantage of the system physics to achieve desired behaviors.

Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Optimal trajectories for a submersible in a cavern

Fast Optimal Control Algorithms

We develop fast algorithms to generate optimal trajectories that are suitable for real-time applications in robotics and autonomous systems.

Two AgileX LIMO Robots

Adversarial Driving

We develop adversarial driving strategies to create unsafe situations to systematically test autonomous driving systems.

Position history of quadrotors using an energy-optimizing control policy

Optimization-Based Control

We develop optimization-based control policies that encode intelligent behavior using real-time sensing and communication.

Sponsor: Army Research Lab

News & Updates

December 2025

L-CSS and ACC Papers

Our papers on QP-based tracking and microrobot motion planning have been accepted to the IEEE Control Systems Society Letters and 2026 American Control Conference, respectively.
November 2025

ODU TV Commercial

Dr. Beaver and the ROC Lab were featured in a 30-second ODU Brand Anthem advertisement.
September 2025

Editor's Pick

Our paper on optimal motion with PINNs was selected as an editor's pick in the ASME Letters in Dynamic Systems and Control.
September 2025

Proposal Awarded

ARL has awarded us a $60k STIR proposal entitled "Emergent Flocking Behavior through Energy Minimization".
July 2025

CDC Papers

Our conference paper on connected automated vehicles and our abstract on formation flocking have been accepted for presentation at CDC.
July 2025

New Journal Article

Our paper on flocking using differential games is available online.
July 2025

Student Competition

The ODU AV team got 5th place at the 2025 Quanser Self-Driving Car Student Competition, just beating MIT.
June 2025

MECC Papers

Our articles on mass-adaptive admittance control and composite PINNs were accepted to the 2025 Modeling, Estimation, and Control Conference.
December 2024

AAAI Papers

Our article on global games for multi-robot task allocation was accepted to the 2025 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence annual conference.
November 2024

New Journal Article

Our article on constraint-driven control for UAV flocking was published in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
October 2024

MECC Papers

We presented our L-DSC article on physics-informed neural networks for manipulation at the 2024 Modeling, Estimation, and Control conference.
July 2024

ACC Workshop

Our workshop on learning and control for multi-agent systems had over 40 attendees at the 2024 American Control Conference.
May 2024

Summer Scholarship

Brock recieved a $5,000 scholarship from the Perry Honor's College to develop an autonomous blimp prototype.
May 2024

ACC Papers

Our article on autonomous driving was jointly accepted to L-CSS and the 2024 American Control Conference.
February 2024

New RA-L Article

Our article on learning and control for micron-scale robots was published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
January 2024

New Automatica Article

Our article on fast optimal control was published in Automatica.
December 2023

Proposal Awarded

Virginia Space Grant Consortium has awarded us a $10,000 seed grant throught the Young Investigator Program to develop game-theoretic solutions to multi-robot task allocation.
July 2023

IFAC Workshop

We co-organized the first tutorial on ecologically inspired robotics at the 2023 IFAC World Congress.
July 2023

Starting at ODU

Dr. Beaver officially joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Old Dominion University.

Get In Touch

Interested in joining the lab or collaborating?

Location

Engineering and Computational Sciences Building
Room 1319
4700 Elkhorn Avenue
Norfolk, VA 23529

email: lbeaver {at} odu.edu

Prospective Students

We're always looking for motivated PhD and MS students interested in robotics, optimization, and control. Please don't send an email unless you're responding to a specific opening that has been posted. The department makes all admission decisions by committee.