Sandipan Mishra

Sandipan Mishra

Associate Professor, Mechanical Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering

Email: mishrs2@rpi.edu
Phone: 518-276-2020

Education / Experience
  • PhD 2008, University of California Berkeley, USA
  • Postdoctoral research associate 2008-2010, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Research Expertise & Interests

Professor Sandipan Mishra’s research expertise is in the area of systems and control theory, learning control, nonlinear estimation, and precision mechatronics, as applied to additive manufacturing, unmanned aerial vehicles and smart buildings. He is the PI of the ISAaC laboratory at RPI, which is supported by grants from government agencies including NSF, the DoD, and DoE, along with industrial partners including Hewlett Packard Labs, Sikorsky, Mathworks Inc., National Instruments, Simmetrix, and Vivonics Inc. 

Rotary-Wing/VTOL Application

Professor Mishra’s broad interest in VTOL is in the area of autonomy for aerial vehicles. Specifically, his research has focused on the design of time-optimal guidance control strategies for landing and maneuvers for autonomous aerial vehicles such as helicopters. His research group aims to design guidance, navigation and control strategies that are robust to modeling uncertainty, solvable in real-time (in a predictive control framework), and reactive to external disturbances and changes in landing deck motion. For general UAV’s, Prof. Mishra’s research enables the integration of advanced optimization and learning-based algorithms into typical flight control strategies for fully autonomous rotorcrafts in a seamless manner (as a plug-and-play) while guaranteeing performance and safety. Towards this, his research group is developing predictive-reactive control algorithms that generate optimal navigation and guidance policies for path planning in the presence of emergent and changing environments (such as obstacles or moving targets, waypoints, mission criteria, payloads etc.)