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Abdullah Altawaitan
Ph.D. Candidate at UC San Diego
Robotics | Machine Learning | Control

About

I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California San Diego. I'm working under the guidance of Prof. Nikolay Atanasov at the Existential Robotics Laboratory. Before embarking on my Ph.D. journey, I worked at Honeywell as a project engineer. I received my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

News

Apr'26
Checkout our latest paper on Adapting Neural Robot Dynamics on the Fly for Predictive Control.
Oct'25
Our paper on Port-Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning and Control on Lie Groups received the Best 2025 Paper Award from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Control!
Sep'25
Our paper on Learned IMU Bias for Invariant Visual Inertial Odometry has been accepted to RA-L.
Jun'25
Passed my Qualifying Exam and advanced to candidacy!
May'25
Our paper on Port-Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning and Control on Lie Groups received an honorable mention for the 2024 T-RO King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award!
May'25
Check out our latest paper on Learned IMU Bias for Invariant Visual Inertial Odometry.
Nov'24
Our paper on Learning-based MPC for Quadruped Jumping Maneuvers has been accepted to RA-L.
Jul'24
Submitted our joint paper with USC on Learning-based MPC for Quadruped Jumping Maneuvers to RA-L.
Jun'24
Our paper on Port-Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning and Control on Lie Groups has been accepted to T-RO.
May'24
Presented our work on Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning from Observations at ICRA'24 in Yokohama, Japan.
Jan'24
Submitted our paper on Port-Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning and Control on Lie Groups to T-RO.
Sep'23
Submitted our paper on Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning from Observations to ICRA'24.
Jun'23
Passed my Preliminary Exam!
Jan'23
Took on the lab manager role at the Aerodrome, part of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.

Publications

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Adapting Neural Robot Dynamics on the Fly for Predictive Control

Abdullah Altawaitan and Nikolay Atanasov
arXiv preprint, 2026.
Paper Webpage
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Learned IMU Bias Prediction for Invariant Visual Inertial Odometry

Abdullah Altawaitan, Jason Stanley, Sambaran Ghosal, Thai Duong, Nikolay Atanasov
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025.
Paper
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Variable-Frequency Model Learning and Predictive Control for Jumping Maneuvers on Legged Robots

Chuong Nguyen, Abdullah Altawaitan, Thai Duong, Nikolay Atanasov, Quan Nguyen
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025.
Paper Video Code
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Port-Hamiltonian Neural ODE Networks on Lie Groups For Robot Dynamics Learning and Control

Thai Duong, Abdullah Altawaitan, Jason Stanley, Nikolay Atanasov
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2024.
🏆Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award
🏆Best Paper Award from IEEE RAS TC on Robot Control
Paper Video Webpage
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Hamiltonian Dynamics Learning from Point Cloud Observations for Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Control

Abdullah Altawaitan, Jason Stanley, Sambaran Ghosal, Thai Duong, Nikolay Atanasov
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
Paper Video Webpage
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