news

Aug 27, 2026 This past summer, I wrapped up my internship at the USDOT HASS COE and presented our work titled From Language to Logic: A Theoretical Architecture for VLM-Grounded Safe Navigation at ICUAS 2026 in Corfu, Greece! A copy of our paper is available in the conference proceedings here (Note that the site is password protected, UN and PW both ‘ICUAS2026’.) 🎓 We also published our recent work, DRIVE-SAFE: Data-Driven Robustness and Informed Validation for Evolving Specifications via Formal Evaluation, in Wiley’s Advanced Robotics Research journal. This paper is the second is the second in a two-part series exploring the use of formal methods and temporal specifications to evaluate black-box autonomous mobile robots.📄
May 11, 2026 It’s been a busy spring - three quick announcements below!
  1. We presented our work at the High Confidence Software & Systems (HCSS) Conference 2026 this month! 👩🏻‍🏫
  2. Our paper From Language to Logic: A Theoretical Architecture for VLM-Grounded Safe Navigation was accepted to ICUAS 2026 - come see our talk at the Testing and Evaluation: Autonomy II track on Thursday, June 18th! 🛩️
  3. Our research made the UMD Aerospace Engineering Spring 2026 newsletter! Read more about it here.🛣️
Feb 20, 2026 I am excited to join the US epartment of Transportation Highly Automated Systems Safety Center of Excellence (DOT HASS COE) this coming summer as a DOTSI intern!
Oct 16, 2025 The Xu Research Group participated in the AI for Good Media Day at UMD College Park!
Oct 09, 2025 MarylandToday wrote an article about our research! Check it out here.
May 14, 2025 We presented our work, titled A Framework for Black-Box Controller Design to Automatically Satisfy Specifications Using Signal Temporal Logic, a ICUAS 2025 in Charlotte, NC!