State of the ADCL

 

June 3rd, 2025

Mission

  1. Create new knowledge through research
  2. Become better researchers and engineers
  3. Share knowledge with the world

While

  1. Honoring our purpose as humans
  2. Building a community

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  1. Publishing papers relates to all 3 goals
  2. Making true contributions \(\implies\) Elite-Level Performance
  3. 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

cu-adcl.org

  • 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