State of the ADCL
June 3rd, 2025
Mission
- Create new knowledge through research
- Become better researchers and engineers
- Share knowledge with the world
While
- Honoring our purpose as humans
- Building a community
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- Publishing papers relates to all 3 goals
- Making true contributions \(\implies\) Elite-Level Performance
- We have limited resources
Accomplishments
Since lab founded in 2020
- 25 Publications (6 Journal, 6 JEC, 10 Peer Reviewed, 3 Other)
- ~70 Classes Passed
- 3 Theses (1 PhD, 2 MS)
- 1 Comprehensive Exam, 6 Prelim/Quals
- 1 RSS Workshop Organized
- $3.4 Million funding secured for lab (including overhead)
- $15.1 Million for us and collaborators
Resources - Money
(After overhead subtracted, +/- $20k)
| Project | Yearly Amount | Ends |
|---|---|---|
| CAREER (NSF) | $80k | 2029 |
| DECODE AI (ONR) | $160k | 2029 |
| MART (NSF) | $80k | Dec 2025 |
| CAAMS (Industry) | $120k ??? (split w/ Nisar) | Every year |
| SURI (AFOSR) | $160k | Now??? |
| SURP (JPL) | $35k | Sept 2025 |
| Startup | $83k | Dec 2025 |
| Plants (Berkeley) | $65k | Now |
(A student costs about $70k per year: Salary, Benefits, Tuition/Fees)
Other costs: My summer salary, Equipment, Hourly
Resources - Time
- Managing time / motivation / priorities is one of the biggest challenges in this line of work.
- Pitfalls:
- Focus too much on small short-term wins and neglect the big hard things
- Focus too much on the next idea and don't finish the current one
- Underestimate the challenges and miss deadlines
- Think of yourself as a time entrepreneur
- Focus on most important things
- I will suggest too many ideas in our meetings to do all of them
- How much time do you need to commit to this?
- Minimum: paid time on contracts (20hr/wk during year | 40 hr/wk during summer)
- Time to perform at an elite level (one journal/JEC every year/1.5 years). For me, this was more than 40 hours per week
- The ways this works in the department vary significantly (Some other professors have time sheets or pay at 20 hours per week in summer)
ADCL Summer 2025
What can we do to work towards this goal?
- I am trying to elevate the priority of working on papers
Goal for Summer 2025: Renew focus on Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Work
In the last 5 years we have positioned ourselves for this
- ADCL students: learning and trying out ideas
- Zach: funding, teaching
Thank you for all of your hard work!
Autonomous Decision and Control Laboratory
-
Algorithmic Contributions
- Scalable algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs)
- Motion planning with safety guarantees
- Game theoretic algorithms
-
Theoretical Contributions
- Particle POMDP approximation bounds
-
Applications
- Space Domain Awareness
- Autonomous Driving
- Autonomous Aerial Scientific Missions
- Search and Rescue
- Space Exploration
- Ecology
-
Open Source Software
- POMDPs.jl Julia ecosystem
PI: Prof. Zachary Sunberg
PhD Students
Postdoc
State of the ADCL 2025
By Zachary Sunberg
