8/12/2026 Em Jankauski
Illinois ECE researchers Sayan Mitra, Daniel Liberzon and Ege Yuceel earn a Best Paper Award for research enabling robots to localize with limited sensing.
Written by Em Jankauski
Imagine waking up in an unfamiliar room with your eyes closed. You don’t know where you are, but you have to orient yourself. That’s the challenge University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering researchers are tackling — not for people, but for robots navigating complex environments.
Grainger College of Engineering researchers Sayan Mitra, Daniel Liberzon and Ege Yuceel recently received the Best Paper Award in the Foundations Track at the 29th annual ACM/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control and 17th ACM/IEEE Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems. The honor recognizes their paper, “Active Localization of Unstable Systems in Coarse Information.”
“Our paper asks, ‘Can we still figure out where the robot is?’” Mitra said. “The answer is yes, under certain conditions, and we developed a method to do it.”
Their work shows that robots, including aerial vehicles, may eventually be able to navigate reliably using remarkably little sensing hardware, potentially making robotic systems simpler, lighter, and more efficient.
The award builds on years of foundational research. Mitra and Liberzon are investigators on the Hybrid Dynamics – Deconstruction and Aggregation, or HyDDRA project, which is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Multi-University Research Initiative Program.
This project brings together researchers from four universities to develop new mathematical approaches to hybrid control.
“It’s gratifying to see the community appreciate this line of research,” Mitra said. “The work builds on several earlier publications that laid the groundwork for using minimal information for estimation and localization.”
For Yuceel, the award represents more than a single accomplishment. It points toward a new direction for robotics research.
“We showed that minimality in estimation and control needs to be co-designed rather than treated as separate problems, where you optimize one and hope the other works out,” Yuceel said. “I’d love to see that idea taken all the way to joint design — not just to estimation and control, but of algorithms and hardware together — so the guarantees we prove on paper carry all the way through to real systems.”
By showing that reliable localization is possible even with limited information, the ECE team’s work brings robots one step closer to navigating difficult environments with great efficiency and confidence.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Sayan Mitra is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Information Trust Institute, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Center for Digital Agriculture. He holds a John Bardeen Faculty Scholar appointment.
Daniel M Liberzon is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Mathematics. Liberzon holds the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Electrical and Chemical Engineering appointment.