Welcome!
My name is David van Wijk and I am a third year PhD student in the Aerospace Engineering Department at Texas A&M University in the Land, Air and Space Robotics (LASR) Laboratory led by Professor Manoranjan Majji. Currently, my main research interest is in safe autonomy using control barrier functions for robotics applications. I have done work in safe autonomy for autonomous rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (ARPOD) scenarios, in tandem with Reinforcement Learning (RL). For a full list of publications, please see my google scholar.
Since Fall 2022, I’ve been funded through a fellowship with the Air Force Research Laboratory in the Safe Autonomy group, led by Dr. Kerianne Hobbs. The safe autonomy group seeks to develop solutions that allow safe learning-enabled control on USAF and USSF aerospace systems. We mainly use run time assurance methods in order to monitor RL/ML policies and determine when to intervene, and with what action, to ensure safety of the controller and the overall system.
I graduated Magna Cum Laude in May of 2021 from Cornell University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Sibley school of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. During my undergraduate studies, I was an active member in the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC) under Professor Silvia Ferrari, concentrating on classical control for quadrotors, object detection, and mapping. My research contributed to a paper on Directional Sensor Planning for Occlusion Avoidance published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics [link].
In the summer of 2020, I worked with the mechanical engineering team at Northrop Grumman Remotec (Clinton, TN) on the design, analysis, and documentation of mechanical components for their hazardous duty robotic vehicles. Primarily using Autodesk Inventor, I was given a lot of creative freedom to design mechanical parts in order to satisfy requirements for the newest prototype of their medium weight Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). I love watching my mechanical designs come to life, and this experience really solidified my interest in robotics.
On a different note, I grew up in upstate New York in an international household, so I speak Italian fluently and can hold my own in Spanish. I enjoy playing soccer, reading science fiction and cooking.
Recent Awards:
- AERO Graduate Excellence Fellowship Award: Fall 2022, Fall 2023. Merit based fellowship to support graduate student education at Texas A&M University, Aerospace Engineering. This is a competitive fellowship open to all qualified students. Award determined by the TAMU-AERO Graduate Program Committee.
- Engineering Graduate Merit Doctoral Fellowship: Fall 2021. This highly competitive fellowship is awarded to one student for each participating department per year (department of Aerospace Engineering in this case).