Quang Phuc Nhu Kieu

Quang Phuc Nhu Kieu is a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science advancing autonomous insect-scale aerial robots by developing lightweight electrical systems. Despite decades of research, practical deployment remains limited by robots’ dependence on external power amplifiers and motion capture systems. This challenge spans three critical autonomy barriers: power, sensing, and computation. Quang advances power autonomy through innovative high-voltage circuit design, creating sub-gram flyback converters that improve energy efficiency by 30%. Using optimization and symbolic computation, he derives optimal component selections and driving waveforms to integrate with a colleague’s custom lithium-ion battery. He designed and fabricated a 244-mg compute and sensing package, deploying real-time control models on a tiny microcontroller. These efforts enabled one of the first computation and sensory autonomous flights in a sub-gram robot. As a MathWorks Fellow, Quang will focus on overcoming the remaining barriers to autonomy in insect-scale robots, bringing them closer to practical deployment.