I’m a Robotics Technologist in the Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. I am broadly interested in autonomy for mobile robotic systems operating in challenging environments: often this means facing situations that are uncertain, unknown, or unstructured. This frequently involves extending and inventing new tools from optimal control, numerical optimization, reinforcement learning, machine learning, motion planning, and their interplay with state estimation, localization, and perception. The overarching goal is to make autonomous robotic operations safer and more efficient when human-in-the-loop operation becomes infeasible, risky, or wasteful. I am particularly excited about:

• Infusing learning-based tools into planning and control to improve efficiency and safety under imperfect knowledge.
• Providing or enhancing safety guarantees for uncertain dynamical systems, including when new information is revealed online.
• Considering perception, localization, and “information gain” explicitly in robotic planning.
• Autonomy frameworks incorporating the above for exploration, space, and other extreme environment robotics applications.

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I will be joining the faculty at the University of Southern California in Fall 2025! The Laboratory for Autonomous Systems in Exploration and Robotics (LASER) will continue to pursue exciting research in these areas.

Motivated students with backgrounds in robotics, aerospace/mechanical engineering, computer science, controls, and related fields are encouraged to apply for Ph.D. or research-based S.M. positions. Please indicate your interest on your application materials to USC Viterbi. You can also email me directly with your CV at kalbee@usc.edu with subject line [LASER-APPLY].