Current Lab Members

Alaisha Alexander is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She obtained a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of...... more

Dana is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering....... more

Elliot completed his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brown University in 2017 and is currently a Mechanical Engineering doctoral student at Stanford. His research focuses on the interplay...... more

Autonomous vehicles, almost by definition, hold promise to replace the driver in an increasing number of scenarios. However, this dream brings with it an enormous set of complexities; fundamentally, the...... more

Race car drivers show exceptional skill in repeatedly pushing their cars to the limits given the extraordinary and highly dynamic environments experienced during racing. John Kegelman, Mechanical...... more

State of the art automated vehicles can safely navigate planned paths which do not exceed limitations imposed by friction and other physical properties. Planning trustworthy paths, however, is challenging...... more

John Subosits, Mechanical Engineering graduate student, works to model the stability and performance limits of vehicles more aggressively and accurately. He started by improving the ability of autonomous...... more

Human drivers will be present on roadways for many years to come, even as fully autonomous vehicles become more prevalent. The insights garnered from research on keeping autonomous vehicles safe are...... more

Jon develops algorithms for handling extreme situations; this research is currently manifest as MARTY, the world's first & only autonomous electric drifting DeLorean.

As autonomous cars move on to the open road, they will increasingly encounter situations involving high lateral acceleration and limited friction. It is important that we have control strategies that can...... more

In order to make autonomous vehicles safe, they must be able to learn and adapt to a variety of operating conditions. Nathan is interested in using learning to improve the vehicle’s control capabilities.

Sarah Thornton currently pursues her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. She obtained her Sc.M. degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in...... more

Tushar's research is focused on the dynamics of drifting and how they apply in safety systems for emergencies. He is incorporating the use of brakes into the current drift controllers using MARTY

Vincent is investigating how autonomous cars can use all locally available tire-road friction, and match the vehicle control skills of the best human race car drivers in the world

Vivian is examining the effect of modelling choices on vehicle performance when leveraging a model predictive control framework.