Roya Firoozi

Roya Firoozi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Prior to this role, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University’s Multi-Robot Systems Laboratory. Roya holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Control Theory, with minors in Optimization and Machine Learning, from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory, with a focus on enabling safe robot autonomy in interactive, open-world environments.

• Robotics aided by generative AI
• Multi-modal perception and planning
• Interactive autonomy in multi-agent systems
• Game theory and distributed optimization for multi-agent interactions
• Safe robot autonomy

• 2024, Postdoc, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, USA
• 2021, PhD, Control Theory, Optimization and ML, University of California Berkeley, USA
• 2014, Bachelor's, Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, USA

• National Science Foundation, NSF Postdoctoral Research ASEE Fellowship, 2021-2023
• NextProf Nexus, 2022
• Rising Stars in Aerospace Engineering, 2022
• Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2021
• Rising Stars in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, 2020
• Graduate Remote Instruction Innovation Fellowship, 2020
• Graduate Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation, NSF Honorable Mention, 2016
• Chancellor's Fellowship for Graduate Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2015
• UC Berkeley Top-Off Award, 2015

• Roya Firoozi, Johnathan Tucker, Stephen Tian, Anirudha Majumdar, Jiankai Sun, Weiyu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Shuran Song, Ashish Kapoor, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Danny Driess, Jiajun Wu, Cewu Lu, Mac Schwager, "Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future" The International Journal of Robotics Research. 2024. doi:10.1177/02783649241281508
• Ola Shorinwa and Johnathan Tucker and Aliyah Smith and Aiden Swann and Timothy Chen and Roya Firoozi and Monroe David Kennedy and Mac Schwager, “Splat-MOVER: Multi-Stage, Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation via Editable Gaussian Splatting”, 8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning, 2024.
• Roya Firoozi, Alex Mir, Gadiel S. Camps and Mac Schwager, "OA-MPC: Occlusion-Aware MPC for Guaranteed Safe Robot Navigation with Unseen Dynamic Obstacles," in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, doi: 10.1109/TCST.2024.3520462.
• Chan Kim, Keonwoo Kim, Mintaek Oh, Hanbi Baek, Jiyan Lee, Donghwi Jung, Soojin Woo, Younkyung Woo, John Tucker, Roya Firoozi, Seung-Woo Seo, Mac Schwager, Seong-Woo Kim, “E2Map: Experience-and-Emotion Map for Self-Reflective Robot Navigation with Language Models”, under review in ICRA 2025.
• Roya Firoozi, Laura Ferranti, Xiaojing Zhang, Sebastian Nejadnik and Francesco Borrelli, "A Distributed Multi-Vehicle Coordination Algorithm for Navigation in Tight Environments," in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 73, no. 10, pp. 14499-14509, Oct. 2024, doi: 10.1109/TVT.2024.3409687.
• Makram Chahine, Roya Firoozi, Wei Xiao, Mac Schwager and Daniela Rus, "Intention Communication and Hypothesis Likelihood in Game-Theoretic Motion Planning," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 1223-1230, March 2023, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2023.3238131.
• Makram Chahine, Roya Firoozi, Wei Xiao, Mac Schwager and Daniela Rus, "Local Non-Cooperative Games with Principled Player Selection for Scalable Motion Planning," 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Detroit, MI, USA, 2023, pp. 880-887, doi: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10341677.
• Roya Firoozi, Xiaojing Zhang, Francesco Borrelli, “Formation and reconfiguration of tight multi-lane platoons”, Control Engineering Practice, Volume 108, 2021, 104714, ISSN 0967-0661.
• Roya Firoozi, Sara Sattarzadeh and Satadru Dey, "Cylindrical Battery Fault Detection Under Extreme Fast Charging: A Physics-Based Learning Approach," in IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 1241-1250, June 2022, doi: 10.1109/TEC.2021.3112950.
• Roya Firoozi, Rien Quirynen and Stefano Di Cairano, "Coordination of Autonomous Vehicles and Dynamic Traffic Rules in Mixed Automated/Manual Traffic," 2022 American Control Conference (ACC), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2022, pp. 1030-1035, doi: 10.23919/ACC53348.2022.9867802.