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Aerospace Engineering,
Computational Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

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Education:
Ph.D., Stanford University in Electrical Engineering

Research Interests:

  • Design of humanoid and exoskeleton robots
  • Task and motion planning for agile mobile manipulation
  • Human autonomy teaming
  • Autonomous robots

Luis Sentis is a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a General Dynamics Endowed Faculty Fellow, and a member of UT Austin's Good Systems. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow while at Stanford. He holds a B.S. degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Before Stanford, he worked in Silicon Valley as a Control Systems Engineer for clean room automation.

In Austin, he leads the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, a laboratory focusing on control, task and motion planning, human factors, and experimentation with humanoid robots, mobile manipulation robots, exoskeletons and autonomous systems. He is also a founding member of the UT Robotics Portfolio Program and the UT Ethics of AI Portfolio Program. He was the UT Austin's Lead for DARPA's Robotics Challenge with NASA Johnson Space Center where he helped to design and test the Valkyrie humanoid robot. His research has been funded by ONR, NASA, NSF, ARL, AFC, DARPA and private companies.

He has been awarded the NASA Elite Team Award for his contributions to NASA’s Johnson Space Center Software Robotics and Simulation Division. He is also a founding member and innovation advisor for Apptronik Systems, a company focusing on human-centered robotic products.

News

Sam Morgan and Todd Humphreys

Sam Morgan Wins Best Paper Award for Satellite Navigation Innovation

Sam Morgan has received the Best Student Paper Award at this year’s IEEE/ION PLANS Symposium.

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group of graduation seniors 2025

Go Change the World, Class of 2025

Congratulations to our Class of 2025 students who will be leaving the Forty Acres soon to continue their engineering journeys in the real world.

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ASE 324L class group photo

Move Forward by Looking Inward: Advice to Students from Professor Manuel Rausch

Professor Manuel Rausch shares advice for students as they prepare to leave the Forty Acres and transition to their next journeys in life.

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Krithik Vishwanath

Scholarships Support Computational Research in Oncology and Glaciology

Computational engineering junior Krithik Vishwanath has been awarded the 2025 Graham F. Carey Computational Science Scholarship by the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

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Research

From land and water on Earth to the stars and beyond, our research is not only changing the world and the lives of people who live here – it is transforming the future of air travel and space exploration, creating opportunities for future discoveries outside our world. At UT Aerospace, the sky is not the limit.

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Earthrise over Moon
 

Research Areas

$25.5M

In Research Expenditures

#9

Graduate Aerospace Engineering Program in the Nation

U.S. News & World Report

#10

Undergraduate Aerospace Engineering Program in the Nation

U.S. News & World Report

Spotlights

Explore more at the ASE/EM Department

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ASE/EM Academy of Distinguished Alumni

Meet the Class of 2025

group of graduating seniors looking at a book

Go Change the World, Class of 2025

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Faculty Openings

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Research Seminars

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