Patrick Sherman
Bio:
I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Virginia working in the Autonomous Mobile Robots Lab (AMR Lab) and Link Lab under Dr. Nicola Bezzo. I completed my B.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri followed by a M.S. in mechanical engineering at Stanford University where I focused on the design & control of mechatronic and robotic systems. After finishing my M.S., I worked for many years as a robotics software engineer at a small startup in San Francisco.
Returning to academia in the fall of 2022, my research is focused on the control and motion-planning for heterogeneous, multi-robot systems.

Research:
A Control Barrier Function Framework for Symbiotic Collaboration in Heterogeneous Aerial-Ground Robotic Systems [CDC '26]
Heterogeneous robotic systems often possess complementary capabilities that are underutilized in multi-robot applications. Although symbiotic collaboration within a robot team could intuitively achieve a more resilient and capable system, formally realizing such behavior is a complex technical challenge. In this paper, we present a novel control architecture that formally defines a symbiotic relationship between complementary robotic agents. As a motivating example, we consider a system composed of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The UAV scouts ahead to detect unsafe terrain for the UGV, but is constrained by limited battery capacity. In return for information regarding unsafe terrain, the UGV acts as a mobile recharging station for the UAV. To formalize these mutually beneficial interactions, we encode them as strict safety constraints within a time-varying and exponential Control Barrier Function (CBF) framework. We also introduce a dual-layer planning architecture that decouples long-term system liveness from local safety: a high-level planner ensures the generation of feasible global path, with a re-planning triggered when new information is received; while the low-level CBF filter continuously modifies nominal control inputs to guarantee real-time, system-wide safety.

A Unified Framework for Mission-Gain-Aware Proactive Planning and Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots [RA-L '26]
Mobile robots often face challenges operating in partially known environments where success depends on factors such as robot capabilities, task characteristics, and the environment. This letter presents a generalized, modular framework that enables robots to explicitly account for these factors through the concept of a mission-gain: a pose dependent metric quantifying mission performance (e.g. visibility). When the environment can be proactively explored, a cost map encoding the value of the mission-gain is generated and integrated into a cost function for a model predictive path integral (MPPI) controller, which supports arbitrary mission-specific cost functions. The controller generates inputs that balance progress toward the goal with improved mission performance. The map generation is decoupled from the control execution, making the framework modular and well-suited for heterogeneous multi-robot systems. To address transmission demands of large maps, we distill the map into a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) approximation, yielding a representation with far fewer parameters. The approach is validated in simulations and lab experiments across two scenarios: occlusion-aware navigation and vibration minimization over rough-terrain. The results for both scenarios show the mission-gain aware robot successfully reaching the goal while improving mission safety.

A Heterogeneous System of Systems Framework for Proactive Path Planning of a UAV-assisted UGV in Uncertain Environments [IROS '24]
A common challenge for mobile robots is traversing uncertain environments containing obstacles, rough terrain, or hazards. Without full knowledge of the environment, an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigating towards a goal could easily drive down a path that is blocked (requiring the robot to retrace sections of its path) or run into a hazard causing a catastrophic failure. To address this issue we propose a system of systems (SoS) abstraction to group a distributed set of robots into a single system. Specifically, we propose augmenting the sensing capabilities of a UGV using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). With different dynamic and sensing capabilities, the UAV scouts ahead and proactively updates the plan for the UGV using information discovered about the environment. To predict reachable states of the UGV, the UAV employs a sampling-based method in which a set of virtual particles representing simulated instances of the UGV are used to approximate the distribution of possible trajectories. The UAV assesses if the current UGV path plan is inefficient or unsafe, and if so, provides an alternative path to the UGV. For robustness, a model predictive path integral (MPPI) optimization method is used to modify the waypoints when delivered to the UGV. The strategy is validated in simulation and experimentally.

Work Experience
Creator Inc.
Robotics Software Engineer
2015-2022
Flextronics
Automation Engineer
2014-2015
Education
Stanford Universtiy
M.S. in Mechanical Engineering
University of Missouri
B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
2012-2014
2008-2012
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