Position
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Office Phone
609-258-2017
Email
jfisac@princeton.edu
Assistant
Kevin Shaw
Office
B316 Engineering Quadrangle
Advisee(s):
Maryam Abdurrahman
Cedrick Argueta
Madison Bland
Kai-Chieh Hsu
Haimin Hu
Duy Phuong Nguyen
Elie Svoll
Zixu Zhang
Bio/Description
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
I am interested in ensuring the safe operation of robotic systems in the human space.
My work combines safety analysis from control theory with machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to enable robotic systems to reason competently about their own safety in spite of using inevitably fallible models of the world and other agents. We do this by having robots monitor their own ability to understand the world around them, accounting for how the gap between their models and reality affects their ability to guarantee safety.
Much of my research uses dynamic game theory together with insights from cognitive science to enable robots to strategically plan their interaction with human beings in contexts ranging from human-robot teamwork to drone navigation and autonomous driving. My lab’s scope spans theoretical work, algorithm design, and implementation on a variety of robotic platforms.
Prior to joining the Princeton faculty in Fall 2020, I spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as Google's Self-Driving Car project), working on autonomous vehicle safety and interaction.
If you are interested in joining my lab as a student, please consider applying to Princeton!
Selected Publications
J. F.?Fisac*, A. K. Akametalu*, M. N. Zeilinger, S. Kaynama, J. H. Gillula, and C. J. Tomlin. “A general safety framework for learning-based control in uncertain robotic systems,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2019
J. F.?Fisac*, N. Lugovoy*, V. Rubies Royo, S. Ghosh, C. J. Tomlin. “Bridging Hamilton-Jacobi Safety Analysis and Reinforcement Learning,” International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019
J. F.?Fisac*, E. Bronstein*, E. Stefansson, D. Sadigh, S. S. Sastry, and A. D. Dragan. “Hierarchical Game- Theoretic Planning for Autonomous Vehicles,” International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019
J. F.?Fisac*, A. Bajcsy*, S. L. Herbert, D. Fridovich-Keil, S. Wang, C. J. Tomlin, and A. D. Dragan. “Probabilistically Safe Robot Planning with Confidence-Based Human Predictions,” Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2018
J. F.?Fisac, M. Chen, C. J. Tomlin, and S. S. Sastry. “Reach-avoid problems with time-varying dynamics, targets and constraints”. International Conference on Hybrid Systems Computation and Control (HSCC), 2015
Google Scholar Profile
Honors and Awards
Google Research Scholar Award, 2022
Best Paper Award in Technical Advances, ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), 2020
UC Berkeley?Leon O. Chua Award?to Outstanding Achievement in Nonlinear Science, 2019
Related NewsFernández Fisac has won a Google research award to develop safer, more nuanced robotics
Research Areas
Robotics & Cyberphysical Systems