Lu Gan
Lu Gan joined the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in January 2024. She leads the Lu's Navigation and Autonomous Robotics (Lunar) Lab at Georgia Tech, and is on the core faculty of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Her research interests include robot perception, robot learning, and autonomous navigation. Her group explores the use of computer vision, machine learning, estimation, probabilistic inference, kinematics and dynamics to develop autonomous systems in ground, air, and space applications.
She holds a B.S. in Automation from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, an M.S. in Control Engineering from Beihang University, and received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining Georgia Tech, she had a two-year appointment as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology and the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies at Caltech.
Prof. Gan’s course offerings in Aerospace Engineering primarily fall within the Flight Mechanics & Controls curriculum, covering system dynamics modeling, analysis, and control. Her instruction emphasizes the development of students’ analytical and practical skills in designing control systems. Prof. Gan’s additional teaching interests lie in the field of mobile robotics, with a focus on the mathematical foundations underlying robot mobility, including key concepts such as optimization, estimation, and control. In these courses, she aims to provide students with both strong theoretical understanding and practical skill development, complemented by extensive hands-on experience.
Prof. Gan’s research centers on robotics and autonomous systems, including robot perception and estimation, learning-based control, and autonomous navigation. Her work advances the intelligence and robustness of autonomous systems in ground, air, and space applications.
Lab/Collaborations:
- Lu’s Navigation and Autonomous Robotics (Lunar) Lab
- Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM)
Disciplines:
- Flight Mechanics & Controls
AE Multidisciplinary Research Areas:
- Robotics, Autonomy, and Human Interactions
- B.S., Automation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 2013
- M.S., Control Engineering, Beihang University, 2016
- M.S., Robotics, University of Michigan, 2021
- Ph.D., Robotics, University of Michigan, 2022
- DAAD AInet Fellowship, 2023
- Rising Star in Data Science, University of Chicago, 2022
- National Graduate Scholarship of China, 2015
- IROS Best Paper Award on Agri-Robotics (Finalist), 2023
- Z. Yoon, L. Y Zhu, J. Lu, L. Gan, Y. Zhao, "STATE-NAV: Stability-Aware Traversability Estimation for Bipedal Navigation on Rough Terrain," IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 2338-2345, 2026.
- L. Zhao, S. Wei, J. Hays, L. Gan, "GaussianFormer3D: Multi-Modal Gaussian-based Semantic Occupancy Prediction with 3D Deformable Attention," 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026.
- S. Narayanan, L. Zhao, L. Gan, Y. Chen, “Diffusion-Denoised Hyperspectral Gaussian Splatting," International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2026.
- F. Xie, S. Wei, Y. Song, Y. Yue, L. Gan, "Morphological-Symmetry-Equivariant Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Robotic Dynamics Learning," Proceedings of the 7th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC), PMLR 283:1392-1405, 2025.
- D. Butterfield, S. S. Garimella, N.-J. Cheng and L. Gan, "MI-HGNN: Morphology-Informed Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Legged Robot Contact Perception," 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2025, pp. 10110-10116.