Derya Aksaray

Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics

Contact

612-624-0529

daksaray@umn.edu

Akerman Hall
Room 216
110 Union Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Education

Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014

M.S., Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011

B.S., Aerospace Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, 2008

Research Lab | Research Overview

Professional Background

Beginning January 2018: Assistant Professor, Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics, University of Minnesota

2016 - 2017: Postdoctoral Associate, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2014 - 2016: Postdoctoral Researcher, Boston University

2008 - 2014: Graduate Research Assistant, Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology

Scientific & Professional Societies

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Research Interests

UMN Experts Page

Professor Aksaray's research mainly focuses on design and control of verifiable autonomous systems for resilient operation in partially known and unstructured environments. In particular, she is interested in developing reactive planning strategies for resilient operation of robots in the face of disturbances, synthesizing provably-correct controllers to guarantee desired behaviors, and designing models and algorithms that enable autonomous systems to effectively team with humans and other robots. Overall, her research interests primarily lie in the areas of control theory, formal methods, and machine learning, with applications to aerospace systems and robotics.

Teaching Subjects

AEM 2011 -- Statics

AEM 2301 -- Mechanics of Flight

Currently Teaching Courses

AEM 8495 - Advanced Topics Aerospace Systems

Honors and Awards

2013: AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Conference, Travel Grant awarded by poster competition

2013: American Control Conference, Best Presentation in Session award

2008: AHA Helicopter Design Competition, Member/Coordinator of Best New Entrant Team

2007: EUROAVIA Design Workshop (1 of 25 participants across Europe)

Selected Publications

C.I Vasile, D. Aksaray, and C. Belta, 2017, "Time Window Temporal Logic", Theoretical Computer Science, 691, 27-54, (Journal Article)

R. Paul, J. Arkin, D. Aksaray, N. Roy, and T.M Howard, 2017, "Efficient Grounding of Abstract Spatial Concepts for Natural Language Interaction with Robot Platforms", International Journal of Robotics Research, 4929-4933, (Journal Article)

K.E. Schaefer, J.Y.C. Chen, J. Wright, D. Aksaray, N. Roy, 2017, "Challenges with Incorporation Context into Human-Robot Teaming", (Journal Article)

K. Leahy, D. Aksaray, and C. Belta, 2017, "Informative Path Planning under Temporal Logic Constraints with Performance Guarantees", (Journal Article)

M. Tucker, D. Aksaray, R. Paul, G.J. Stein and N. Roy, 2017, "Learning Unknown Groundings for Natural Language Interaction with Mobile Robots", International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), 16 pages, (Journal Article)

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