Randy (Jushan) Chen
About Me
I am an upcoming PhD Research Intern at GE Aerospace Research (Summer 2026). I am currently pursuing my PhD in Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am supervised by Dr. Santiago Paternain. I do research in the intersection of AI and robotics. I study efficient and scalable multi-robot decision-making and planning by leveraging state-of-the-art generative models, reinforcement learning, optimal control, and dynamic games. Previously, I finished both my B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I was supervised by Dr. Negar Mehr, who is now an assistant professor at UC Berkeley.
I moved to the U.S. at the age of 16 and finished high school in Columbia, South Carolina. In my leisure time, I play the piano, play video games, go to the gym, etc. I also like singing; I am a huge fan of Jay Chou (周杰伦，a phenomenal mega star who is the equivalent of Bruno Mars of Asia in terms of his influence). I went to his concert in 2013, when I was 13 years old.
One of my hobbies is maximizing and redeeming the value of my credit card points & miles to get free hotel nights and free flights back and forth between the U.S. and Asia (it’s in fact an optimization problem~). I also have a Youtube channel, and I’m shooting vlogs occasionally for my trips across the U.S. and Asia.
Research Interests
- Trajectory Optimization: trajectory optimization for multi-robot systems
- SLAM: deep visual odometry
- Multi-robot Systems: decentralized optimization/control
- Generative AI in robotics: diffusion models for planning
News
- [Jan. 2026] Our paper “PAD-TRO: Projection-Augmented Diffusion for Direct Trajectory Optimization” is accepted for publication at the 2026 American Control Conference!
- [June. 2025] I started my internship as a Control Systems Intern at DEKA Research & Development.
- [Mar. 2025] Our paper “Learning Closed-Loop Parametric Nash Equilibria of Multi-Agent Collaborative Field Coverage” is now available in preprint on arxiv!
- [May. 2024] I finished my M.S. in aerospace engineering at UIUC. My thesis, titled “Improved pose estimation accuracy of monocular deep visual odometry against dynamic entities via adversarial training,” is made publicly available!
- [Mar. 2024] I have become a US permanent resident and received my green card! I am actively looking for summer internships in aerospace & defense!
- [Jan. 2023] Our paper titled “Distributed Potential ILQR: Scalable Game-Theoretic Trajectory Planning for Multi-Agent Interactions” is accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2023)!
Publications
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Accepted for publication at the 2026 American Control Conference
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ICRA
Distributed Potential ILQR: Scalable Game-Theoretic Trajectory Planning for Multi-Agent InteractionsInternational Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.
In Review