Khai Nguyen

I am currently involved in exciting projects, including AI-powered humanoid robots, sampling-based optimal control, and implicit deep learning.
I did my MS with Zac Manchester as a member of the Robotic Exploration Lab at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. In the summer of 2023, I was a Robotics Student Fellow at the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. I did my BS in Control Engineering and Automation–Talent Program at Hanoi University of Science and Technology.
Email / CV / GitHub / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / X
research
I am driven by elegant solution methods in robot learning and control that target high performance, safety guarantees, data efficiency, and robust generalization—key milestones toward embodied intelligence.
I am open to exploring various theoretical and practical aspects of robotics, drawing on my background in control theory, differentiable optimization, and machine learning.
news
Apr 01, 2025 | I served on the program committee for the RoboARCH workshop at ICRA 2025. |
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Oct 25, 2024 | One paper was accepted at CoRL 2024 Workshop Differentiable Optimization Everywhere. |
Oct 01, 2024 | One paper was submitted to ICLR 2025. |
Jul 20, 2024 | Our work was featured on the Bitcraze blog – the developers of the Crazyflie. |
Jul 16, 2024 | We were the Runner-up of Best Poster Award, IEEE TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics. |
Jun 28, 2024 | Two papers were accepted at two RSS 2024 Workshops: Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics (Spotlight Talk), and Learning for Assistive Robotics. |
May 20, 2024 | TinyMPC won the Best Paper Award in Automation at ICRA 2024. |
Apr 05, 2024 | TinyMPC was selected as a finalist for 03 ICRA Paper Awards. |
Mar 22, 2024 | TinyMPC with new capabilities is now available on arXiv. |
Mar 15, 2024 | I received the Best Poster Award at the MS Research Symposium with the TinyMPC poster. |
Jan 28, 2024 | TinyMPC was accepted to ICRA 2024. |
Oct 30, 2023 | My undergraduate research on formation control and RL was accepted to IJRNC. |
Jul 01, 2023 | I participated in the ETH Robotics Summer School. 🤖 |
Jul 01, 2023 | I started my ETH Robotics Student Fellowship at RSL. 🦿 |
May 08, 2023 | My team advanced to the semi-finals of the F1TENTH competition. 🏁 |
Sep 01, 2022 | I joined Zac Manchester in the Robotic Exploration (REx) Lab. ![]() |
Aug 29, 2022 | I started my graduate study at Carnegie Mellon University. ![]() |
selected publications
- ICRATinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained MicrocontrollersInternational Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024🏆 Best Paper Award in Automation at ICRA 2024
🏆 Finalists of Best Conference Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award at ICRA 2024
🏆 Best Poster Award at CMU MechE Symposium ~ 10%
🏆 Runner-up of Best Poster Award, TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics ~ 10%