Michael Kepler Email & Phone Number

I am an electrical engineer that is passionate about (i) building physical control systems and (ii) understanding the underlying mathematics that enables them to solve complex real-world problems. I enjoy sharing my passion with others, which drives me to be an effective communicator so that my work can be accessible and understood, regardless of a person’s background. While I can work independently, I find great value in collaboration and have found my most enjoyable and fruitful experiences come when working with others.Much of my hands-on experience during my undergraduate studies, such as building autonomous ground vehicles and remotely controlled & monitored cranes, sparked my interest in robotics and control systems and motivated me to pursue my graduate studies to learn the underlying mathematical theory. You can learn more about my hands-on robotics experiences by visiting here http://mason.gmu.edu/~mkepler/.The research for my Master’s thesis, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, focused on developing a small autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can tow very large payloads whose drag is an order of magnitude larger than the drag of the AUV itself. My analysis of the dynamics and maneuvering performance of an AUV-payload tow system led to the decision to place all of the AUV's control surfaces at the nose of the AUV, rather than in the stern, to achieve satisfactory maneuvering performance. My novel analysis techniques and conclusions have resulted in two conference publications. More information can be found here https://marinerobotics.centers.vt.edu/robots-systems-facilities/690auv1.html.Building on my Master’s experience, I received the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship (5.6% acceptance rate) to pursue PhD studies with a focus on collaborative subsea mapping. In order to collaborate, vehicles must use acoustic communication which is notorious for drastically limiting the amount of data that can be shared among teammates. The aim of my research was to develop decentralized approaches that enable agents to reduce inter-vehicle communication, in a principled manner, while maintaining performance. One of the approaches I developed allowed an agent to reduce the amount of communication by two orders of magnitude while maintaining comparable accuracy. The approach was published (47% acceptance rate) at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in 2020. My publications are listed on my Google Scholar profile https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=V0Pjc74AAAAJ&hl=en.