Artificial Intelligence Robotics and Control Systems Group
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Principal Investigator
Abdalla’s research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, focusing on AI-driven safe learning for control, compositional analysis of large-scale systems, and symbolic control / control barrier functions for stability and safety in complex networks.
Email: Abdalla.Swikir@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
PhD Students
Salamah Almazrouei is a Robotics PhD student at MBZUAI. She completed her MSc in Robotics at MBZUAI and focuses on Control Barrier Functions for safety-critical control, with interests in autonomous navigation and control theory.
Ashok Kumar Saini is a Robotics PhD student in MBZUAI's AIRoCS Group and a former Research Engineer I and Research Associate at MBZUAI. He holds a B.Tech from MNIT Jaipur and was previously a Project Associate at IIT Kanpur and a Graduate Engineer Trainee at Orangewood. He builds safe, learning-based robotic manipulation systems with geometric control and formal guarantees using ROS2, MoveIt, MuJoCo, computer vision, IL/RL, and CLF/CBF methods.
Email: ashok.kumar@mbzuai.ac.ae
Malak Mansour is a Robotics PhD student at MBZUAI. She completed her MSc in Robotics at MBZUAI and researches Vision-Language-Action models to improve robot robustness and generalization for intelligent robotic systems with real-world impact.
Email: Malak.Mansour@mbzuai.ac.ae
Tofik Mohammed is a PhD student in Robotics at MBZUAI. He has contributed to research projects on low-level controllers for UAVs and robotic manipulators and previously worked as a university lecturer for more than three years. His research interests focus on developing intelligent and safe control systems for robotic applications.
Email: Tofik.Mohammed@mbzuai.ac.ae
Swapnil is a Robotics PhD student at MBZUAI (MSc Robotics, Bristol; ex-Founding Engineer, listt.io). He builds AI-driven agri-robots (ROS/ROS2, CV, deep learning, hardware), holds five patents, and won IEEE Pune Section Innovator of the Year.
Email: Swapnil.Mane@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Grik is a Robotics PhD student at MBZUAI focused on decentralized, safe multi-agent RL for UAV swarms. Ex-Skoltech, he built swarm landing/navigation and drone-racing perception, and evaluated AnyLoc/VPR.
Email: Grik.Tadevosyan@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Saood is a Robotics PhD student at MBZUAI (Gold Medalist, Master’s in Robotics & Automation, AMU, Aligarh). He works on autonomous systems, SLAM, and biomimetic/soft robotics (fish-inspired AUVs) using ROS, computer vision, path planning, and dynamic modeling.
Email: Saood.Ahmad@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Masters Students
Aditya Narendra is a Masters Robotics student at MBZUAI, a graduate of MIPT in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and a former Research Engineer at the Center for Cognitive Modeling at MIPT. His work focuses on manipulation, navigation, world models, and reinforcement learning, with publications at ICRA, IROS, and CoRL.
Email: aditya.narendra@mbzuai.ac.ae
Rawda is a Robotics Master’s student at MBZUAI with a BSc in Electrical Engineering. She works on computer vision, safe learning, and multi-robot systems to make autonomous robots more reliable.
Email: Rawda.Alsamahi@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Mohammed is a Robotics Master’s student at MBZUAI studying intelligent robotic systems that combine control, perception, and learning. He’s focused on RL for control, multi-robot coordination, and safe aerial-ground cooperation.
Email: Mohammed.Kharroub@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Research Engineers
Nakul Nibe is a Research Engineer in MBZUAI's Robotics Department and an MSc Robotics graduate from MBZUAI. His research focuses on intelligent robotic systems, with interests in robot perception, manipulation, autonomous systems, soft robotics, and learning-based control. He works across ROS 2, computer vision, simulation, embedded systems, and sim-to-real robotic deployment.
Email: Nakul.Nibe@mbzuai.ac.ae
Ramy Kachwaa is a Research Engineer in MBZUAI's Robotics Department, with a master's degree in Robotics and a bachelor's degree in Mechatronics. His work spans navigation, motion planning, robotic manipulation, soft robotics, and control, using ROS1, ROS2, MoveIt, MuJoCo, and computer vision.
Email: Ramy.Kachwaa@mbzuai.ac.ae
Visiting Scholars
Alumni
Research on AI-based learning and control algorithms for robotic systems; contributions across robust control and autonomy.
Email: yancheng.zhu@mbzuai.ac.ae ·
Developed the Python simulation framework for ABC-DS, enabling hypothesis-driven ablations, baseline DS comparisons, and quantitative studies of Lyapunov stability, barrier feasibility, and demo-tracking error across complex (non-star-shaped) obstacle geometries.
Email: yutong.wang@mbzuai.ac.ae
Integrated ABC-DS on a Franka arm and ran systematic trials - demonstration tracking, obstacle compliance, and impedance-control execution - delivering the experimental evidence.
Developed and validated ABC-DS - Lyapunov-stable, barrier-certified polynomial DS learning for safe robot motion around obstacles - focusing on the single-step sum-of-squares formulation.
Email: Mauro.Soto@mbzuai.ac.ae
Built the demo dataset and evaluation suite, extended ABC-DS to non-star-shaped obstacles (including holes), and analyzed the method’s stability/safety guarantees.
Email: Mustafa.Juboori@mbzuai.ac.ae