• Hi!
    I'm Kasra

    Electrical Engineering Ph.D. and Mechanical Engineering BSc.

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  • Robotic Software Developer and Researcher Interested in Robotics, Control Theory, Machine Learning and Mechatronics.

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About Me

Who Am I?

Hi I'm Kasra Sinaei I am pursuing my graduate studies in the field of "Control" and "Robotics" at the Pennsylvania State Univrsity. I am conducting research on Safety Control via Barrier Functions and their integration with model-free learning algorithms. My undergrad research was focused on Legged Locomotion and humanoid gait control.

I have studied and researched Control Theory, Optimal control, Non-linear Systems, Dynamic and Kinematics of multi-body systems and Robots. I am a proficient Robotic software developer and I have advanced programming skills in CPP, Python, MATLAB and C#.

Control Theory

Robotics

Learning Controllers

Mechatronics

Peer Reviewed Publications
Conference presentations
Paper Citations
Internships & Trainings
Publications

Papers

Education

Education

Expecting graduation on Spring 2026.
Current GPA: 3.9

Advisor: Dr. Donald E. Ebeigbe

Graduated on May 2024.
Current GPA: 3.84

Advisor: Dr. Donald E. Ebeigbe

Graduated on February of 2022.
Cumulitive GPA: 17/20

Advisor: Dr. Ehsan Hosseinian

Experience

Work Experience

Alphaz Intern 2025-Now

I joined Alphaz as an intern in 2025. I have been Working on whole-body-control and planning of a humanoid robot with two 6-DoF arm and a differential-drive mobile base. I also worked on the robot perception and object detection. A great opportunity to build robotic softwares with a combination of modern learning algorithms and classic control theories.

PSU Graduate Researcher 2022-Now

Graduate researcher at CARL (Control and Robotics Lab) located in the Electrical Engineering department of Penn State University. Main focus of our work is towards developing smart controllers and finding formal proof for safety and stability in different settings. We use Unitree Go1 robots and Quanser Q-Arm robot for our experiments.

CAST Undergrad Research Assistant 2019-2022

I was memeber of Dynamic and Control group at Center of Advanced Systems and Technology (CAST). The group was working on humanoid robot gait. Our team successfully designed and fabricated 4 (soon to be 5) full-size humanoid robots. I was working on gait pattern generation and enhancing dnamic walking of the robot. Check out Surena Humanoid website for latest updates on this project.

MEWE Summer Intern 2018, 2019

I joined an Engineering consultant group based in Tehran for two consecutive summers. I learned basics of engineering, drafting, mechanical design and project management.

My Work

Open Source Projects

Door Opening with Mobile manipulators

During my internship at AlphaZ Robotics, I worked on a project involving mobile manipulators for door opening tasks. The goal was to develop a robust planning and control strategy that allows the robot to adapt to various door types and environments. For more details visit this link.

Safety-critical Control

In this research I am studying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) and their applicatins in Robotics. I am trying to extend the CBF capabilities to better handle extreme scenarios that include leaving the safe set and retrieving safety. I have also worked on model-free safety-critical control of complex kinematic/kinetic systems. Check this blog for more details.

Safe Robust Regressor-based Control

My PhD studies focus on developing safety filter for different type of controllers. Regressor-based controllers are an effective approach for ensuring safety in control systems. In this work I added safety layer to a well-known class of robust controllers used and performed an extensive analysis over their performance. Check results of my research in this website.

Race Line Tracking and Autonomous Racing: MPC Vs. Adaptive Control

I am modeling and simulating a race car on a 2D race track for the course project of ME597:MPC and EE582:Adaptive control. This is an ongoing work. See the report on this repo.

Surena Humanoid Robot

As a member of Dynamics and Control team at CAST I was working on gait pattern generation for a full full-size humanoid robot (SURENA V) using Divergent Component of Motion (DCM). We also worked on improving robot's gait stability and robustness with impedance controllers to enable the robot better traverse rough terrains. More Info

Kalman Filterning and System Identification

This project was part of AERSP597 course. I studied and campared different methods for fusing sensors data to estimate position of a differnetial drive robot. Linear KF, Extended KF and Unscented KF were studied in this project. Project Report

Wheeled Biped Robot

This is my undergrad thesis project. I examined dynamics of wheeled legged robots, optimally designed a simulated robot and implemented a novel control startegy that does not deped on robot's full dynamic equations. I also examined robot's jumping in the simulation using the proposed controller. More Info

Pattern Recognition

During the Pattern recognition and Machine Learning course we studied music genre classification using the methods we learned in the class. First we gathered an adequate data set consisting of persian songs and labeled them, then we implemented several supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms such as SVM, KNN, MLP, K-means as well as dimension reduction technics. Project Repo

Reinforcement Learning and Classic Control

In this project I used Policy Gradient Methods for PID controller self tuning in physics engine simulation. I trained a PPO agent and Actor-critic agent to automatically adjust controller gains. Results of this work are presented in a conference that includes simulation of a simple inverted pendulum on wheel.
Astrophotography

I am a space geek!

I have been passionate about astronomy and space since I was a child. My father bought me a small refracting telescope when I was just 9 years old. I used my Apochromatic telescope to stare at the gas giants of our solar system and the craters on the moon. My interest in amateur astronomy stems from this childhood experience. As I am learning imaging and editing technics I share some of my astrophotography results in this page.

Get in Touch

Contact

kasra@psu.edu
kasra.sinaei@gmail.com

Electrical Engineering West, 013-C4,
State College, PA16802

+123 456 7890