Naira Hovakimyan

About

Naira Hovakimyan is a prominent control theorist and robotics researcher whose work spans adaptive control, safe autonomy, and multi-agent systems. She is perhaps best known for her foundational contributions to L1 adaptive control theory, a framework that provides rigorous guarantees on transient and asymptotic performance for systems subject to unknown time-varying parameters and bounded disturbances. Her seminal 2007 paper on this topic has accumulated over 100 citations and established a new paradigm for handling uncertainty in safety-critical control systems, with follow-on work in 2008 further extending these guarantees to non-zero initialization scenarios. Beyond adaptive control, Hovakimyan has made significant strides in safe motion planning and trajectory tracking, integrating contraction theory and control barrier functions to certify robot behavior under model uncertainty and external disturbances. Her research extends into cooperative multi-robot systems, vision-based obstacle avoidance, and socially aware flight planning, reflecting a commitment to translating theoretical advances into practical autonomous systems. More recently, she has explored data-driven approaches such as DiffTune-MPC for learning-based controller tuning and stochastic safe control methods. Across this diverse portfolio, her work consistently bridges rigorous mathematical foundations with real-world robotics applications, making her a highly influential voice in modern control and autonomous systems research.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Guaranteed Transient Performance with L1 Adaptive Controller for Systems with Unknown Time-varying Parameters and Bounded Disturbances: Part I

   109 citations · 2007
2. 2
   adaptive controller for systems with unknown time-varying parameters and disturbances in the presence of non-zero trajectory initialization error

   67 citations · 2008
3. 3
   Tube-Certified Trajectory Tracking for Nonlinear Systems With Robust Control Contraction Metrics

   37 citations · 2022
4. 4
   Safe Feedback Motion Planning: A Contraction Theory and ℒ₁-Adaptive Control Based Approach

   34 citations · 2020
5. 5
   Vision-based cyclic pursuit for cooperative target tracking

   28 citations · 2011
6. 6
   Socially Aware Path Planning for a Flying Robot in Close Proximity of Humans

   21 citations · 2019
7. 7
   Attack-resilient Estimation for Linear Discrete-time Stochastic Systems with Input and State Constraints

   16 citations · 2019
8. 8
   DiffTune-MPC: Closed-Loop Learning for Model Predictive Control

   15 citations · 2024
9. 9
   Path Integral Methods with Stochastic Control Barrier Functions

   14 citations · 2022
10. 10
    Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance of Wheeled Robots Using Fast Estimation

    14 citations · 2009

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links