Submitted to IEEE ICRA 2027
Autonomous aerial refueling
Learned visual keypoints, EKF sensor fusion, and uncertainty-aware MPC for probe-and-drogue docking.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
- Learning-Based Methods
- State Estimation
Minhyuk Jang.
My research is in robotics, with a focus on robust state estimation, learning-based control, and safe motion planning. I work with Prof. Naira Hovakimyan at the Advanced Controls Research Laboratory.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. student, Mechanical Science & Engineering · 2025–present GPA: 4.0 / 4.0
Seoul National University
B.S., Artificial Intelligence & Mechanical Engineering · 2025 GPA: 3.99 / 4.0
College of Engineering Outstanding Graduate Award
Outstanding B.S. Thesis Presentation Award
Research & Projects
Research papers, robot systems, and experiments.
17 projects
Projects can appear in more than one topic.
Submitted to IEEE ICRA 2027
Safe Flow Expansion
Conditional flow matching with control-barrier safety checks to discover new actions in unfamiliar environments.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
- Learning-Based Methods
Submitted to IEEE RA-L
WRAP: robust robot localization
Adaptive noise models, including learned adapters, with Wasserstein-robust EKF/ESKF updates.
- Robotics
- Learning-Based Methods
- State Estimation
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2026
Residual-aware distributionally robust EKF
A robust extended Kalman filter that accounts for noise mismatch and linearization error.
- Robotics
- State Estimation
Autonomous vehicles
Autonomous obstacle avoidance
YOLO perception, motion planning, and control deployed on a full-scale Polaris GEM e4.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
Grand Award · 2024
Korea Robot Aircraft Competition
Led a 25-member team in VTOL design and flight testing; first place among 39 teams.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
Robotic mechanisms
Origami-inspired landing gear
A length-adjustable mechanism, prototyped and tested on a flying quadrotor.
- Robotics
Sampling-based control
Adaptive tuning for MPPI control
Automatic inverse-temperature tuning for model predictive path integral control.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
AIAA Design / Build / Fly
Autonomous glider landing
Landing control for a glider launched from a mothership at 100 m altitude.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
Aircraft development
VTOL: first prototype
Building and testing a quadplane through hover and transition flight.
- Robotics
Model predictive control
Robust control for quadrotor delivery
Combining disturbance observers and MPC to account for unmodeled quadrotor dynamics.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
Aircraft development
VTOL: competition platform
Design, integration, and autonomous flight testing with Team Bulnabi.
- Robotics
- Planning & Control
Teaching & hardware
Quadrotor build & fly seminars
Hands-on seminars covering assembly, calibration, flight experiments, and log analysis.
- Robotics
Preprint
Distributionally Robust Kalman Filter
Noise-centric Wasserstein ambiguity sets for robust filtering under uncertain process and measurement noise.
- State Estimation
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2025
Steady-state distributionally robust Kalman filter
A constant-gain robust estimator obtained from a single offline optimization, with convergence guarantees.
- State Estimation
Preprint
Distributionally robust control & state estimation
Joint control and Kalman filtering for partially observed systems with uncertain disturbance and measurement distributions.
- Planning & Control
- State Estimation
Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (ICROS), 2024
Disturbance-observer stability under model uncertainty
Stability conditions when a disturbance observer's nominal model and the true system have different orders.
- Planning & Control
Publications
Full citationsUncertainty-Aware Vision-Based Autonomous Aerial Refueling
Submitted to IEEE ICRA 2027
Safe Flow Expansion: Discovering Safe Robot Behaviors in Out-of-Distribution Motion Planning
Submitted to IEEE ICRA 2027
WRAP: Wasserstein-Robust Adaptive Plug-in for Robot Localization
Submitted to IEEE RA-L
Residual-Aware Distributionally Robust EKF: Absorbing Linearization Mismatch via Wasserstein Ambiguity
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2026
On the Steady-State Distributionally Robust Kalman Filter
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2025
Stability Analysis of Disturbance Observer under Model Uncertainty with Different System Degrees between True and Nominal Systems
Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (ICROS), 2024
* Equal contribution
Experience & service
Full CVResearch
2025 — Present
Advanced Controls Research Laboratory
Research Assistant · UIUC
2023 — 2025
Learning and Decision Systems Lab
Research Intern · Seoul National University
2024
NEARTHLAB
Aerospace Engineering Intern · GNC Team
Teaching & service
Spring & Fall 2026
TAM 210/211 — Statics
Teaching Assistant · UIUC
Reviewer
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems
2023 — 2025
Bulnabi — SNU Drone Club
Team Leader · Quadrotor build/fly seminars
Korea Robot Aircraft Competition · Grand Award, 2024