Evangelos Theodorou
Evangelos Theodorou earned his diploma in electronic and computer engineering from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece in 2001. He has also received a MSc in production engineering from TUC in 2003, a MSc in computer science and engineering from University of Minnesota in spring of 2007 and a MSc in electrical engineering on dynamics and controls from the University of Southern California(USC) in Spring 2010. In May of 2011 he graduated with his PhD, in computer science at USC. After his PhD, he became a postdoctoral research associate with the department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. In July 2014 he joined the faculty of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as assistant professor. His theoretical research spans the areas of control theory, machine learning, information theory and statistical physics. Applications involve autonomous planning and control in robotics and aerospace systems, bio-inspired control and design.
Professor Theodorou’s teaching interests center on the core principles of aerospace engineering, including flight dynamics, controls, and autonomous systems. He is committed to providing students with a strong foundation in theoretical and applied aspects of dynamic systems and control, integrating analytical methods with practical applications. His teaching involves undergraduate and graduate students, fostering a deep understanding of complex aerospace system behavior and control strategies.
Professor Theodorou’s research focuses on the development of advanced control and optimization methods for dynamic systems, particularly in aerospace applications. His work includes nonlinear and adaptive control, learning-based control algorithms, and trajectory optimization. The research aims to improve the performance, safety, and autonomy of aerospace vehicles through mathematical modeling and real-time control strategies, engaging both graduate and undergraduate researchers in interdisciplinary projects.
Lab/Collaborations:
- Autonomous Control and Decision Systems Laboratory (ACDS)
- Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM)
Disciplines:
- Systems Design & Optimization
- Flight Mechanics & Controls
AE Multidisciplinary Research Areas:
- Robotics, Autonomy, and Human Interactions
Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, 2001; M.S in Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, 2004; M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, 2007; M.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, 2010; Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Southern California, 2011;
- Best Research Assistant Fellow in Computer Science USC 2010
- USC Myronis Fellowship 2009
- T Yoon, AD Saravanos, EA Theodorou, Distributed Stochastic Search for Multi-Agent Model Predictive Control, arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18211, 2025
- GH Liu, T Chen, EA Theodorou, Optimal Control Theoretic Neural Optimizer: From Backpropagation to Dynamic Programming, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2025
- A Tajbakhsh, A Saravanos, J Zhu, EA Theodorou, LT Biegler, ..., Asynchronous Distributed Multi-Robot Motion Planning Under Imperfect Communication, arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.18703, 2025
- A Oshin, RV Ghosh, AD Saravanos, EA Theodorou, Deep FlexQP: Accelerated Nonlinear Programming via Deep Unfolding, arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01565, 2025
- A Ratheesh, V Pacelli, AD Saravanos, EA Theodorou, Operator splitting covariance steering for safe stochastic nonlinear control, 2025 IEEE 64th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 3552-3559, 2025