New faculty members Vladimir Vantsevich and Lee Moradi have established an Autonomous Vehicle Mobility Institute (AVMI) at WPI that is expanding the university’s interdisciplinary research into autonomous vehicle technologies and boosting educational opportunities for students.
Professor Vantsevich and Professor of Practice Moradi, both of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, are building on their extensive experience managing multimillion dollar autonomous vehicle research projects and on WPI’s existing research to position the university as a major contributor to the fields of autonomous vehicles for land, sea, air, and space, says Wole Soboyejo, WPI interim president.
“A significant portion of vehicles on and off roads are expected to be autonomous in the coming decades,” Soboyejo says. “WPI researchers across departments are already doing groundbreaking work in this field, and Vladimir and Lee will allow WPI to transform the scale of our innovations with their expertise and their ability to bring together collaborators with complementary expertise. This will lead to several new opportunities for our students and prepare them for leadership positions in a field that will define the cutting edge of transportation and space exploration."
WPI’s history of autonomous vehicle research spans departments and disciplines. Currently, the university’s researchers are working on projects such as models to sift through large amounts of sensor data from autonomous systems and software that will enable groups of lunar robots to collaborate while exploring the moon.
Vantsevich and Moradi worked together as members of the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) for a decade before joining the WPI faculty in early 2022. They co-direct AVMI, which focuses on technology for off-road autonomous vehicles that travel across rough terrain—everything from farmland to battlefields to other planets. Their work has been funded by the U.S. Army, NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and industry partners in the United States and Western Europe.