Benjamin Aziel
I'm a roboticist (primarily) interested in control and planning for autonomous robotic systems. I'm committed to building systems that are both capable and dependable in constrained, uncertain environments.
About
I recently completed an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a concentration in Mechatronic and Robotic Systems. I graduated summa cum laude with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union in 2024, where I also minored in Computer Science.
My research interests center on developing control and motion planning algorithms with rigorous guarantees for safety, stability, and reliability in uncertain and evolving environments. I'm particularly interested in unifying tools from dynamical systems and optimal control with data-driven modeling, with the goal of enabling robots to adapt online without sacrificing analytical structure or formal guarantees.
At Penn, I conducted research in the Sung Robotics Lab within the GRASP Lab, where I worked on motion generation and path planning for the NASA-funded TRUSSES lunar robotics project under the guidance of Dr. Cynthia Sung and Dr. Daniel Koditschek. My work explored structure-preserving formulations for risk-aware planning, including energy-based models that explicitly incorporate velocity sensitivity. A paper on said work is forthcoming.