Vishal R. Yalla

Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering @ California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Broadly speaking, my work is at the intersection of aerial intelligence and space robotics, where my current research is focused on generalizing aerial autonomy.

I’m a researcher @ Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) at Caltech under the Mory Gharib Research Group, where my research is centered on Symbolic Robotics & Reasoning Algorithms for aerial vehicles. My current work also extends to Visual & Semantic Robotic Perception, Navigation, and Control as applied to aerial flight.

Currently, I’m an intern @ NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), working on GNC (Guidance, Navigation & Control) and autonomy stacks for the Skyfall Mars Helicopter. Previously, I worked on the Science Data System & Operations for NISAR, JPL’s flagship Earth Science mission. I also work on methods for early mission formulation & concept design for JPL’s spaceflight engineering directive.

Previously, I was at the Keck Center for Space Studies (KISS), Caltech and JPL’s think-and-do tank, and the Space Structures Lab @ Caltech. Before this, I was a researcher at the University of Washington (UW) in the Control & Trustworthy Robotics Lab (CTRL) / Autonomous Flight Systems Lab (AFSL), Autonomous Controls Laboratory, and Husky Satellite Lab, among others. In the space sciences, I was a researcher at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), the Green Bank Observatory, and the CERN Elementary Particle Physics Experiment (EPE) Group, where my research was in multi-messenger astrophysics.