Lekan Molu

Researcher, roboticist, engineer --- in that order.

AI Robotics Control

Bio Snippet

TL;DR: Six days a week, all the way through sunday, I ride at dawn for scalable control systems. Optimizer, not a Satisficer.

My research portfolio has a consistent throughline grounded in principled frameworks for autonomy: integrating learning-enabled and safety-critical control with systems representation for robust scalable decision-making under uncertainty. My research arc spans MSR NYC, Amazon Robotics, UPenn, and UTD/UTSW. Prior to my academic career, I was in the manufacturing sector, integrating modern manufacturing processes in FMCG production lines with large-scale distributed supply chain management.

2026 – Present

Senior Research Scientist, Amazon Industrial Robotics Group (IRG).

2025 – Present

Researcher & Founder, Stealth Research Lab.

2021 – 2025

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Lab (NYC).

2019 – 2021

Adjunct Faculty, Brandeis University, Graduate School of Professional Studies.

2019 – 2021

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine ⏪ Transferred from UChicago DCAM.

2018

Research Intern (Robot Learning), Preferred Networks, Tokyo.

2016

Hardware Engineer IV (Intern), Amazon Robotics (Advanced Robotics Lab), MA.

2014 – 2019

PhD Student, University of Texas at Dallas & Visiting Student, UT Southwestern Medical Center.

2011 – 2013

Student, University of Sheffield, Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.

2009 – 2011

(Manufacturing/Production) Supply Chain Manager, Apapa Plant, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company.

2026 – Present

Senior Research Scientist, Amazon Industrial Robotics Group (IRG).

2025 – 2026

Researcher & Founder, Stealth Research Lab.

2021 – 2025

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Lab (NYC).

2019 – 2021

Adjunct Faculty, Brandeis University, Graduate School of Professional Studies.

2019 – 2021

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine ⏪ Transferred from UChicago DCAM.

2018

Research Intern (Robot Learning), Preferred Networks, Tokyo.

2016

Hardware Engineer, Amazon Robotics (Advanced Robotics Lab), MA.

2014 – 2019

PhD Student, University of Texas at Dallas & Visiting Student, UT Southwestern Medical Center.

2011 – 2013

Student, University of Sheffield, Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.

2009 – 2011

(Manufacturing/Production) Supply Chain Manager, Apapa Plant, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company.

Select News Highlights

Jun 03, 2026 Full circle of life moment 🔄✨ I'm back in Amazon Robotics! 🤯🧠⚙️ #RobotsRockAndRoll.

May 29, 2026

🎯 Move over grid-resolved Hamilton–Jacobi (HJ) backward reachable sets/tubes (BRS/BRTs): With a Cole-Hopf-type transformation of the viscous HJ IVP, turns out Feynman-Kac''s formula may recover BRTs as a quasilinearized Gaussian-kernel density representation. In a Picard iterative scheme, we find that 🛡️☠️➡️✨ combinatorial grid explosion reduces to linear Monte-Carlo sampling. Results?😏 ✅ 📊 dimension-independent convergence • 💾 worry-free, memoryless optimization compared to levelsets classical compute baselines • 🔓 tight L²/Hausdorff error bounds from levelset methods• 🤖 and efficacy on benchmarks previously considered computationally intractable 👉➡️ up to 150 million+ European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) in multi-predator (peregrine falcon) games --- on just 2x 80GB H100s --- inspired by recorded murmurations over Rome, Italy. Solves for phase transitions under vacuole nucleation, cordon formation detection, and flocks splitting🌍. 🧠⚡ TL;DR: we may now teach fleets of autonomous robots/cars not just what to do, but where danger geometrically lives. 🌌🏭 HJ-Gauss opens the door to scalable, certifiably trustworthy embodied AI safety verification. Scalability über alles!🎩👌🤯

May 29, 2026

May 24, 2026

For long-horizon planning tasks, finite-dimensional diffusion policies can be wacky. Well, this infinite-dimensional policy royally smacks! 🏭 My recent work moves beyond point-based sampling/estimates in diffusion to function-space diffusion + formal control verification, delivering a principled framework for high-stakes robots-enabled production control systems. Results? 🎯 Improved convergence in robot manipulation tasks. There's more: in supply chain manufacturing, certifiable bottleneck predictions and the reliable dispatch optimization of utilization efficacy also leveled up: CONWIP with certified safety under prediction uncertainty 💪 • 🔍 🚀Bottleneck detection with theoretical grounding • 📈 Smooth dispatch policies ✅ for resilient, efficient supply chains.🏆🎤⬇️

May 24, 2026

April 16, 2026

🚨 Game theory has officially met ER practice 🏥 + 🎮 = ❤️🚀 What if trauma resuscitation teams could coordinate efforts better like a well-oiled machine? Perhaps, healthcare workers' workflows may become: ✅ fairer (balanced workloads ⚖️) ✅ smarter (skill-task alignment 🧠) and ✅ efficient with (rapid, stable decisions ⚡) 🎯 Our latest work addresses these in a distributed generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE)-seeking mechanism, grounded in real clinical workflows at Weill Cornell Medicine. The result? A principled framework for orchestrating high-stakes team dynamics under time pressure, resource constraints, and diverse expertise — delivering the best possible outcomes in real time. 🏆🌍🚀 Now headed to IFAC World Congress! 🎉

April 16, 2026

Nov 2025 Spoke at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative in San Francisco on Reinforcement and Supervised Learning in Medical Physics & Engineering. Slides.

Oct 2025 Delivered a talk at Agility Robotics Salem, OR on Nonlinear, Singularly Perturbed Control for the Humanoid Platform: DIGIT.

Sep 2025 Delivered a talk at the Robotics & AI Institute in Cambridge, MA on Towards Ubiquitous Robotics Automation. Slides.

Aug. 6, 2025 Hearty congratulations to our 2024 intern and resourceful research collaborator Abulikemu Abuduweili. Abu successfully defended his PhD thesis at the CMU Robotics Institute last week. Later in the week, he would ~~sell his soul for a handsome amount to the ultimate devil~~ join Apple as a Robotics Research Scientist/Engineer. Keep shining those bright white lights, Abu!

Aug 2025 Presented at Google DeepMind Robotics, San Francisco on State Representation in Reinforcement Learning. Slides.

Aug 2025 Spoke at Boston Dynamics in Waltham, MA on Embodied Intelligence in Open Embodiments. Slides | Appendix.

Jul 10, 2025 Slides from my ACC 2025 Denver talk.

May 21, 2025 I am attending the next American Control Conference (ACC) in Denver, Co. Among other things, I will be (1) chairing the regular session of nonlinear systems' stability; (2) a panelist on the ASME industry-oriented student special session for students hoping to accelerate their career into industry; and (3) presenting this recent layered nonlinear control paper. Looking forward to hearing and learning from the leading minds in our community.

Mar. 30, 2025 Towards fast strain regulation in continuum robots, in this new ACC 2025 paper we argue for and demonstrate the efficacy of a decentralized continuum dynamical system whose whole-body strain dynamics is resolved in an adaptive and hierarchical nonlinear control fashion.

October 31, 2024 Recent talk at McGill's Mechanical Engineering and MILA, on a layered architecture and time-scale separation control scheme in the quest towards the real-time control of heterogeneous soft robotics devices.

Aug. 27, 2024 Two papers accepted to the IEEE Control and Decision Conference, CDC 2024, Milano, Italia! Evviva!

August 29, 2018 At the Department of Brain Robot Interface (BRI) of Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience (CNS) Labs., I presented our minimax iterative dynamic game work.

Aug 2025 Talked at Wayve Technologies in London on System Identification for Planning in Reinforcement Learning.

Jul 2025 Presented at META Reality Labs in San Francisco on Robustness and Efficient State Representation in Open Embodiments. Slides

Apr 7, 2025 Entertain your mind reading this newly accepted ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) journal article. It describes our GPU-accelerated Levelsetpy safety analyses software package.

Nov. 5, 2024 Together with Volker Pohl, I am co-chairing the computational methods in control theory at the next Conference on Decision and Control in Milan (December 2024). Evviva!

Aug. 24, 2024 Will you be at the next ICRA conference? I am but a weave within the rich tapestry of excellent leaders in the soft robotics community, fashioned together to disseminate the latest findings -- new hardware fabrics, mathematical/ML models, and control tools -- in a workshop on biologically-inspired embodied intelligence for modern robots and devices. Please see the workshop webpage for details.

Aug. 8, 2024 Please join the crescendo of ecstatic congratulations to Dr. Anurag Koul, a former postdoc in our lab and a close collaborator, who is transitioning his academic career into an applied scientist role at Amazon NYC. Bravissimo!

Aug. 3, 2024 Raising a cheer of congratulations to Dr. Shaoru Chen, a former postdoc in our lab and collaborator, who recently ~~sold his soul to LinkedIn~~ joined LinkedIn!

Feb. 24, 2024 Organizing an MSR-wide workshop in Redmond, WA for folks working on group theory applications for model and policy and representation in modern learning algorithms.

Nov. 2, 2023 Recent presentation at Yale University based on our mixed H2/H-infinity stochastic RL policy optimization analysis.

Fall 2023 Spoke at Microsoft Research Game Intelligence Group in Cambridge, UK on Dynamics from Pixels as Time Integrations of Neural Lie Group Homomorphisms. Slides

Feb 10, 2023 New robust policy optimization paper, based on H-infinity control principles for accelerating the convergence of traditional policy optimization schemes in infinite-horizon control settings out in IFAC world congress 2023.

Sep. 30, 2022 Serving as Associate Editor for IEEE's International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshops.

2022 Delivered a talk at Microsoft Research NYC on A Short Treatise on the Kinematics and Kinetics of Robots. Slides

Sep. 30, 2020 Invited to serve as Associate Editor for IEEE's International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

May 16, 2020 Our new soft robot mechanism for motion correction in emerging MRI-LINAC RT systems got accepted for a presentation at the joint John R. Cameron-J.R. Cunningham Young Investigators' Symposium! Please e-attend my talk if you can at AAPM's annual meeting this year.

May 16, 2019 I have successfully defended my PhD Thesis. Thanks to the mentors I worked with during my graduate program, viz., Steve B. Jiang, and Nick Gans, and my dissertation committee members: Mark Spong, T. Summers, Y. Tadesse and D. Bhatia.

Nov. 07, 2019 I am teaching a robot manipulation course at Brandeis in the winter and spring of 2020 as an Adjunct Faculty. I am keeping the lecture notes here as I develop them and the course progreses.

August 20, 2019 The docker repo for my IROS 2018 Minimax iDG Submission has moved to the following repo: lakehanne/ros. Look for the idg_iros18 tag. I will continue hosting the youbotbuntu14 repo on my hub for the next six months before I finally delete it.

January 31, 2019 Starting in the summer of 2019, after I shall have defended my PhD thesis, I shall be resuming as a postdoc at The University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine.

Oct. 07, 2018 Thanks to the generous support of Google AI, I will be attending the full tutorials, workshops, and program sessions at NIPS 2018. Bonjour Montréal!

October 6, 2018 I had a reyt good great time at this year's IROS and ROSCon in Madrid. Here are links to pictures of my IROS talk, ROSCon meeting, and video of Marc Raibert's mini-spot demo

September 06, 2018 Deep BOO! gets accepted to the Workshop on the Algorithm Foundations of Robotics (WAFR). WAFR has an "established reputation as one, if not the most, important venue for presenting algorithmic work related to robotics".

July 05, 2018 I had the pleasure of presenting my research outlook on stably learning the dynamics of nonlinear robot trajectories to the management team of Preferred Networks, Tokyo earlier this afternoon.

June 2018 Our IROS2018 submission is a definite accept. Codes here. Videos on my home page. Hallo Brisbane!

April 24, 2018 Our Minimax iDG paper gets accepted to the Machine Learning for Planning and Control Workshop at ICRA 2018. Codes here. Videos on my home page. Hallo Brisbane!

August 2017 Awarded the NSF Doctoral Consortium Award.

August 2017 The camera-ready version of Soft-NeuroAdapt is now on arxiv. Codes are on github.

July 2017 Our submission got accepted to IROS abstract only track. Video here.

July 2017 Awarded the Open Software for Robotics Foundation (OSRF) scholarship.

June 2017 Brandon Amos' OptNet paper was accepted to ICML. I am mentioned in the acknowledgement section alongside Ian Goodfellow.

August 2017 I will be pitching my start-up idea to VCs in Vancouver in October. Yeah, sure. Come in and argue!

Talk Highlights

11/25 Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, San Francisco, CA

Reinforcement and Supervised Learning in Medical Physics & Engineering

09/25 Robotics & AI Institute, Cambridge MA

Towards Ubiquitous Robotics Automation

08/25 Google DeepMind Robotics, SF CA

State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

08/25 Wayve Technologies, London UK

System Identification for Planning in Reinforcement Learning

08/25 Boston Dynamics, Waltham MA

Embodied Intelligence in Open Embodiments Appendix

Mentoring Activities

Previous interns, postdocs, and students include:

Taylor Webb

Princeton Neuroscience PhD · UCLA Postdoc → MSR Postdoc '24/25 → Asst. Professor, Université de Montréal

Leilei Cui

MSR Intern '22 → NYU Engineering PhD → Postdoctoral Scholar, MIT → Asst. Professor, Univ. of New Mexico

Adwait Kulkarni

VP of Smart Trailer Engineering, Drōv Technologies, OKC, OK

Harley Wiltzer

MSR Intern '23 · McGill PhD (advised by Meger & Bellemare) → MTS, Inception Labs

Abulikemu Abuduweili

CMU Robotics PhD → MSR Intern '24 → Researcher, Apple Robotics

Editorial / Community Service

Leadership & Organization

Co-Organizer, Microsoft Cortex Research Series, FY25, 2024–2025.
Mentee Lead, (Microsoft) T&R Mentoring Ring FY25, 2024–2025.
Co-Coordinator, RL Discussion Group Series, Microsoft Research, 2023–2024.

Conference Chairing

ACC, Chair — Nonlinear Systems Session, Denver, CO, July 2025.
IEEE CDC, Chair — Numerical Methods in Control, Milano, Italia, Dec. 2024.

Editorial Roles

Associate Editor, ICRA Workshops, 2022–2023.
Associate Editor, ICRA, 2020–2021.
External Grants Reviewer, AI for Species Discovery, National Geographic Society, 2020–2021.

Reviewing

Journals: Automatica, IEEE L-CSS, IEEE RA-L, JBHI, IOP PhysMed, IEEE Access, NCAA.
Conferences: ICRA, CDC, IROS, DSCC, ACC, ICML, ICLR, IFAC World Congress, NeurIPS.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committees (TC)

Member, IEEE RAS TC on Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion. 2024 – Present.

Member, IEEE RAS TC on Soft Robotics. 2023 – Present.

Member, IEEE RAS TC on Cognitive Robotics. 2023 – Present.

Member, IEEE RAS TC on Automation in Health Care. 2023 – Present.

Member, IEEE RAS TC on Aerial Robotics. 2023 – Present.

Member, IEEE RAS TC on UAVs. 2023 – Present.

Professional Memberships

IEEE IEEE RAS IEEE CSS

Former AAPM ASTRO NYAS

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of KOMs

When away from work, I am probably on my road bike. I ride rain or shine, hell or highwater. From the parching heats of sultry Texas to the blustering cold winds of the Northeast.

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