Katherine Mao

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I’m Katherine Mao, a doctoral student in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at GRASP at the University of Pennsylvania. I am is co-advised by Vijay Kumar and M. Ani Hsieh. Previously, I complete my BS at Purdue University in Mechanical Engineering (2020) with minors in Computer Science and Math. There, I had the oppportunity to work with Jeff Rhoads on MEMS systems and chemical sensing.

My interests lie in agile robot motion planning and aerial robotics.

Curriculum Vitae (July 2025)

news

Aug 01, 2025 Our work Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis has been accepted to CoRL 2025! Check out the pre-print and code.
Jun 21, 2025 Our work Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis was presented at Workshop on Leveraging Implicit Methods for Aerial Autonomy as an invited paper at RSS 2025! Check out the pre-print and code.
Jun 30, 2024 Our work TOPPQuad: Dynamically-Feasible Time-Optimal Path Parametrization for Quadrotors has been accepted to IROS 2024! Check out the pre-print and code.
Jan 16, 2023 The first paper of my PhD, Trajectory Planning for the Bidirectional Quadrotor as a Differentially Flat Hybrid System has been accepted to ICRA 2023! Shoutout to my co-author Jake Welde for all your help! Check out the paper.

selected publications

  1. Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis
    Katherine Mao, Hongzhan Yu, Ruipeng Zhang, Igor Spasojevic, M Ani Hsieh, Sicun Gao, and Vijay Kumar
    2025
    arXiv Code
  2. TOPPQuad: Dynamically-Feasible Time-Optimal Path Parametrization for Quadrotors
    Katherine Mao, Igor Spasojevic, M. Ani Hsieh, and Vijay Kumar
    In 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
    DOI arXiv Code
  3. Trajectory Planning for the Bidirectional Quadrotor as a Differentially Flat Hybrid System
    Katherine Mao, Jake Welde, M. Ani Hsieh, and Vijay Kumar
    In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
    DOI