Roberto Tron Receives the 2021 Early Career Research Excellence Award
Roberto Tron is the recipient of the 2021 Boston University College of Engineering Early Career Research Excellence Award. This annual award celebrates extraordinary success in building high-impact research program early in one’s career.
Tron is a CISE Faculty Affiliate and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests combine elements of systems and control theory, robotics, and computer vision, with particular emphasis on multiple robotic agents and human-robot interactions.
Roberto has made significant contributions in addressing questions of safety and performance of teams in complex environments and managing the computation load incurred when agents are performing cooperative tasks. Roberto’s work has also extended to developing novel, distributed sensor platforms that combine techniques from robotics and machine learning with dynamic models of human motion to enable larger segments of the population to age in place. Roberto’s far-ranging contributions across fields exemplify the strength of our college in convergent research. He has received more than $3M in funding as PI to date from the NSF, NIH, AHA, and ONR, and he is also a lead investigator on a MURI award from the DOD. He has graduated 4 PhD students, has more than 3000 citations, and is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Roberto has also been instrumental in expanding the college’s robotics curriculum through innovative additions of coursework and pedagogy.