Mahmoud Ali

About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Intelligent Systems Engineering at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington, where I work in the Vehicle Autonomy and Intelligence Lab (VAIL), advised by Prof. Lantao Liu.

My Ph.D. research develops autonomous navigation for robots operating in unstructured environments such as forests, caves, and off-road terrain. I am especially interested in unifying perception, mapping, and control into a single coherent framework built on Gaussian processes — enabling mapless navigation, traversability analysis, and memory-efficient representations of high-fidelity sensory data for reliable robot decision-making.

More recently, I have been pushing this work toward high-speed autonomous racing as part of the IU-Luddy Autonomous Racing team competing in the Indy Autonomous Challenge. I have since joined Nomaverse as a Perception & Navigation Engineer, where I work on scene understanding.

Before joining VAIL, I was a robotics software engineer in the Cognitive Robotics department at TU Delft (Netherlands), coordinating the EU Horizon 2020 RobotUnion project and building ROS-based tools with robotics startups. I hold an Erasmus Mundus joint M.Sc. in Advanced Robotics (EMARO+) from École Centrale de Nantes and the University of Genoa.

Autonomous Navigation Scene Understanding Field & Off-road Robotics Autonomous Racing Mapping & Exploration

News

  • Aug 2026Paper accepted to ISRR 2026: DrGNN: Doppler-Routed Graph Neural Networks with Consistent Regression for Radar Perception.
  • Apr 2026Paper accepted to RSS 2026 (Sydney, Australia): Adaptive Smooth Tchebycheff Attention for Multi-Objective Policy Optimization (Murillo-Gonzalez, Ali, Liu).
  • Apr 2026Joined Nomaverse as a part-time Perception & Navigation Engineer.
  • Dec 2025Successfully passed my Ph.D. dissertation proposal defense.
  • Jul 2025The IU-Luddy team finished 4th of 8 teams at the Indy Autonomous Challenge race, WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. (Radar/Lidar Perception Lead)
  • May 2025Paper accepted to IEEE RA-L: Chance-Constrained Sampling-Based MPC for Collision Avoidance in Uncertain Dynamic Environments.
  • Apr 2025Awarded 2nd place in the ChengWu Innovation Challenge.
  • Jan 2025IAC time-trial at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway — top speed 163 mph. (Radar/Lidar Perception Lead)
  • Sep 2024Our IU-Luddy Autonomous Racing team reached 128 MPH at the Indy Autonomous Challenge (Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Sep 6, 2024).
  • Jul 2024Volunteered as a ROS & simulation tutorial instructor for the IU-Luddy Precollege Camp.
  • Jun 2024Joined Stanley Black & Decker as a Software Engineer Intern (Jun–Aug).
  • Mar 2024Passed my Ph.D. qualifying examination.
  • Jan 2024Two papers accepted to ICRA 2024 (Yokohama): Autonomous Mapless Navigation on Uneven Terrains (arXiv) & Gaussian Process-based Traversability Analysis for Terrain Mapless Navigation (arXiv).
  • Nov 2023Racing team secured 4th of 18 in the first phase of the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) simulation races. (Team Technical Co-Lead)
  • Nov 2023Released the source code for GP-guided MPPI (Code).
  • Oct 2023Presented GP-guided MPPI for Efficient Navigation in Complex Unknown Cluttered Environments at IROS 2023 (Detroit, USA).
  • Oct 2023Reviewing two papers for ICRA 2024.
  • Oct 2023Registered in the IAC simulation races as an official IAC university representing Indiana University.
  • Aug 2023Serving as a Teaching Assistant for the Autonomous Robotics course.
  • Jul 2023Reviewing one paper for the Autonomous Robots journal.
  • Jul 2023Presented Autonomous Navigation, Mapping, and Exploration Using Gaussian Processes at RSS 2023 (Daegu, South Korea).
  • Jun 2023Paper accepted to IROS 2023: GP-guided MPPI, integrating MPPI with a local perception model based on Sparse Gaussian Processes (arXiv).
  • Apr 2023Paper accepted to RSS 2023: Autonomous Navigation, Mapping, and Exploration Using Gaussian Processes.
  • Jan 2023Two papers accepted to ICRA 2023 (London, UK): Light-Weight Pointcloud Representation with Sparse Gaussian Process (arXiv) & GP-Frontier for Local Mapless Navigation (arXiv).
  • Aug 2021Joined the Vehicle Autonomy and Intelligence Lab (VAIL) as a Ph.D. student with a Research Assistant position.
  • Jan 2019Started as a Robotics Software Engineer in the Cognitive Robotics department at TU Delft.
  • Sep 2018Defended my master’s thesis: Event-based bio-inspired depth estimation using iCub.
  • Mar 2018Started an internship at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Event-Driven Perception group.
  • Jul 2017Passed the first year of EMARO+ (Rank 1/7) and attended the EMARO-Days workshop in Genoa, Italy.
  • Jun 2017Defended my first-year project, Turtlebot Localization Using Visual Markers (with Kevin Serrano).
  • Sep 2016Started the EMARO+ master’s program at École Centrale de Nantes, France.
  • Aug 2016Supervised the Egyptian team at the IDC RoboCon 2016 contest in Bangkok, Thailand.
  • May 2016Awarded the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to join EMARO+.
  • Oct 2014Started as a Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Egypt.
  • Jul 2014Graduated from the Control department, Menoufia University (Rank 2/380), and competed in the IDC RoboCon 2014 contest in Rabat, Morocco.

Selected publications

GP-guided
MPPI

GP-guided MPPI for Efficient Navigation in Complex Unknown Cluttered Environments

Ihab S. Mohamed*, Mahmoud Ali*, Lantao Liu

IROS 2023IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems

arXiv IEEE Code Video
GP
Exploration

Autonomous Navigation, Mapping, and Exploration Using Gaussian Processes

Mahmoud Ali, Hassan Jardali, Nicholas Roy, Lantao Liu

RSS 2023Robotics: Science and Systems

PDF
Uneven
Terrain

Autonomous Mapless Navigation on Uneven Terrains

Hassan Jardali, Mahmoud Ali, Lantao Liu

ICRA 2024IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation

arXiv IEEE

See all publications →