Ali Pakniyat

Ali Pakniyat is the founder and director of Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Control (M³AC) Lab, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, followed by two postdoctoral positions in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and in the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech.

His research establishes a unified mathematical and computational foundation for the optimal control of deterministic and stochastic nonlinear multi-modal and multi-agent systems. Key theoretical contributions include unifying the Hybrid Minimum Principle (HMP) and Hybrid Dynamic Programming (HDP), establishing rigorous frameworks for exact state delivery and measure-theoretic distribution shaping for nonlinear stochastic systems, and advancing multi-agent theory ranging from finite networks of agents to emergent mean-field and graphon limits.

To translate these theoretical guarantees into deployable physical autonomy, he leverages techniques from convex optimization, Monte Carlo sampling, Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), and generative machine learning to overcome high-dimensional computational bottlenecks. These solutions are validated across real-world domains — including multi-modal AeroMarine drones, electric-vehicle powertrains, Mars surface delivery systems, epidemiology and mathematical-finance models, and heterogeneous multi-agent systems.

From Theory to Deployed Autonomy

Validated across real-world domains.

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