Ioannis (Yiannis) Kantaros

Research

Yiannis Kantaros' research focuses on developing scientific principles for improving the safety, robustness, efficiency and versatility of autonomous robot teams. His lab is interested in designing autonomous systems that can perceive and reason about the ambient environment, adapt to unanticipated situations, and effectively coordinate with each other to accomplish complex, long-term, collaborative tasks. To realize this research, Professor Kantaros develops new autonomy frameworks drawing tools from distributed control and optimization, multi-agent systems, task and motion planning, machine learning, active sensing and perception and formal methods.

Biography

Yiannis Kantaros joined the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor in January 2022. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the GRASP and the PRECISE lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 from the University of Patras in Greece. He also earned MSc and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University in 2017 and 2018, respectively. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2nd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) in 2014 and was a finalist for the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2024. Additionally, he received the 2017-18 Outstanding Dissertation Research Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University, as well as a 2024 NSF CAREER Award.