Research Interests

My research focuses on robot learning, with an emphasis on real-to-sim-to-real systems and robot foundation models. I develop methods for training and evaluating policies in simulation that transfer to hardware, with the goal of enabling reliable, safe, and deployable robots that can perform useful tasks in the real world.

News

• [09/2026] I am serving as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2027.
• [09/2026] Our paper on SERF: Spatiotemporal Environment and Robot Feature Map for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation has been accepted to CoRL 2026 as a Spotlight.
• [06/2026] Our paper on SERF: Spatiotemporal Environment and Robot Feature Map for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation received the Best Paper Award at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Multi-Modal Spatial AI for Robust Navigation and Open-World Understanding.
• [05/2026] My PhD dissertation was awarded the 2026 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal by the UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences.
• [05/2026] Our paper on Neural Configuration-Space Barriers for Manipulation Planning and Control has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE).
• [04/2026] Our paper on Contact-Aware Planning and Control of Continuum Robots in Highly Constrained Environments received Best Poster Awards at two IEEE RoboSoft 2026 workshops.
• [09/2025] Our paper on Certifying Stability of Reinforcement Learning Policies using Generalized Lyapunov Functions has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
• [09/2025] I successfully defended my PhD dissertation on "Certifiable Robot Control under Uncertainty: Towards Safety, Stability, and Robustness"!
• [07/2025] Our paper on Neural Configuration Distance Function for Continuum Robot Control has been accepted to IROS 2025.
• [05/2025] Our paper on Sensor-based Distributionally Robust Control for Safe Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments has been accepted to IJRR.
• [04/2025] I am honored to be selected as RSS Pioneers 2025 for my work on Certifiable Robot Autonomy under Uncertainty!
• [08/2024] Our paper on Distributionally Robust Policy and Lyapunov-Certificate Learning has been accepted to IEEE OJ-CSYS.
• [07/2024] Our paper on Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems through Control Barrier Functions has been accepted to CDC 2024.
• [01/2024] Our paper on Safe Stabilizing Control for Polygonal Robots in Dynamic Elliptical Environments has been accepted to ACC 2024.
• [12/2023] Our paper on Feasibility Analysis and Regularity Characterization of Distributionally Robust Safe Stabilizing Controllers has been accepted to L-CSS.
• [03/2023] Our paper on Distributionally Robust Lyapunov Function Search Under Uncertainty has been accepted to L4DC 2023.
• [01/2023] Our paper on Safe and Stable Control Synthesis for Uncertain System Models via Distributionally Robust Optimization has been accepted to ACC 2023.
• [06/2022] Our paper on Safe Control Synthesis with Uncertain Dynamics and Constraints has been accepted to RA-L with IROS 2022.
• [03/2021] Our paper on Learning Barrier Functions with Memory for Robust Safe Navigation has been accepted to RA-L with ICRA 2021. 🎉🎉🎉

Selected Publications

• SERF: Spatiotemporal Environment and Robot Feature Map for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation
  Sunghwan Kim, Byeonghyun Pak, Kehan Long, Yulun Tian, Nikolay Atanasov
  Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026 (Spotlight)
  project page arXiv code bibtex
• Certifying Stability of Reinforcement Learning Policies using Generalized Lyapunov Functions
  Kehan Long, Jorge Cortés, Nikolay Atanasov
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
  arXiv code bibtex
• Neural Configuration-Space Barriers for Manipulation Planning and Control
  Kehan Long, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikola Raicevic, Niyas Attasseri, Melvin Leok, Nikolay Atanasov
  IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE), 2026
  project page arXiv code bibtex
• Neural Configuration Distance Function for Continuum Robot Control
  Kehan Long, Hardik Parwana, Georgios Fainekos, Bardh Hoxha, Hideki Okamoto, Nikolay Atanasov
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025
  arXiv code bibtex
• Sensor-Based Distributionally Robust Control for Safe Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments
  Kehan Long, Yinzhuang Yi, Zhirui Dai, Sylvia Herbert, Jorge Cortés, Nikolay Atanasov
  The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2026
  project page arXiv code bibtex
• Safe Control Synthesis With Uncertain Dynamics and Constraints
  Kehan Long, Vikas Dhiman, Melvin Leok, Jorge Cortés, Nikolay Atanasov
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022
  arXiv bibtex
• Learning Barrier Functions With Memory for Robust Safe Navigation
  Kehan Long, Cheng Qian, Jorge Cortés, Nikolay Atanasov
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021
  arXiv bibtex