Profiles

Professor Park received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2015 from the University of Maryland, U.S. Following his Ph.D., he held postdoctoral researcher positions at the National Geographic Society in 2016 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), U.S., from 2016 to 2019.

He joined KAUST in January 2021 as the principal investigator of the Distributed Robotics and Autonomy (DSA) Group. Prior to joining KAUST, he served as an associate research scholar at Princeton University, U.S., where he contributed to cross-departmental robotics projects.

Professor Park’s past research includes developing animal-borne sensor networks to study wild animal groups in their natural environments. He also created a fleet of urban autonomous surface vessels designed for transporting people and providing delivery and trash removal services through urban canal networks. In 2019, his innovative work was highlighted by MIT News.

Professor Park’s research focuses on the design and control of multi-robot systems. He strives to advance robotics science and engineering and seeks innovative ways to solve societal challenges using robotics technology. He pursues new and creative approaches to synergizing the individual robots’ core capabilities and strengthening the autonomy of robotic groups to solve large-scale problems.

His DSA Group investigates innovative concepts to address fundamental research questions in multi-agent, robotics and control systems. Their central focus is conceiving novel models and computational methods for multi-agent coordination and developing and deploying robotic/control systems for monitoring real-world environments such as the Red Sea.

Lucas graduated in Electrical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil, on December 2019. From January to July 2019, he was a visiting student at the Information Systems Lab/KAUST, when he worked on indoor localization systems using acoustic waves. In the following year, he joined KAUST as a MSc. student under the supervision of Dr. Tareq Al-Naffouri. He successfully obtained his MSc. degree in December 2021. His Master's thesis is titled A Bayesian Approach to D2D Proximity Estimation using Radio CSI Measurements, and the continuation of this work led to a journal publication at the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the Distributed Systems and Autonomy Group/KAUST, under the supervision of Dr. Shinkyu Park.

Lucas' research interests are multi-agent systems, robotics, and deep learning (especially Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning).

Mohammad Alharbi is a master student in Electrical Engineering department within CEMSE division at King Abdullah University of science and Technology (KAUST).  He received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia and joined KAUST in Fall 2017.  Currently, he is working on experimental implementation of robust control strategies for parabolic solar collectors.

Nowadays, the decrease in fossil resources along with the increase of their environmental impact is driving the world to renewable energy to meet the energy demand. Solar energy represents one promising alternative clean energy source. The heat transfer mechanism of the solar collector is concentrating the sunlight by the parabolic shaped mirrors to the central tube which contain the fluid to be heated.

However, Solar energy is affected by the environmental changes such as solar irradiance.  Therefore, the aim is to design controller to force the outlet temperature to track the desired level by changing the fluid velocity.  A small-scale set-up is built to mimic the outdoor set-up for testing the controller in a controlled environment before going to the harsh environment outside.  Also, understanding the dynamic of the system will be easier inside controlled environment.