Lekan Molu

Researcher · AI. Control. Autonomous Systems.

Rerum Cognoscere Causas — To know the causes of things.
Building safe, stable, robust, reliable, and resilient (S²3R) foundational AI and control systems for autonomous systems.

AI Autonomous Systems Robotics Control

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Bio Snippet

2025 – Present

Researcher, 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.

2019

Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine.

2018

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

2016

Mechatronics Intern, Amazon Robotics (Advanced Robotics Lab), Greater Boston, MA.

2014 – 2019

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

2012 – 2013

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

Select News Highlights

Aug. 6, 2025 A very 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; thereafter he sold his soul to Apple as a Robotics Research Scientist/Engineer. Keep shining those bright white lights, Abu!

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.

April 09, 2025 Check out this sizzling hot complete and unabridged commentary on some of my recent research efforts surrounding safety and robustness in decision-making by autonomous systems and soft robots modeling and control.

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.

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!

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

April 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.

March 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.

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

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.

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.

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

September 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 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.

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

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.

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.

October 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.

Talk Highlights

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

Abulikemu Abuduweili

CMU Robotics PhD → MSR Intern '24 → Research Scientist, Reliant 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 Technical Committees

Member, IEEE RAS TCs on Soft Robotics · Cognitive Robotics · Algorithms for Planning & Control · Automation in Health Care · Aerial Robotics & 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.

Countries bikeprint

🇺🇸 US🇬🇧 UK🇦🇹 AT🇯🇵 JP 🇨🇦 CA🇮🇹 IT🇨🇭 CH🇩🇪 DE 🇪🇸 ES🇵🇹 PT🇫🇮 FI

US States bikeprint

MANHCTNYNJ PADEFLTXIL WIINHIWA

Recent Readings

2026

The Startup Way

Eric Ries

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Jack Weatherford

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History -- And How It Shattered A Nation

Andrew Ross Sorkin

Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence

Harlow Giles Unger

2025

Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project

(General) Leslie M. Groves

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

Isaac Asimov's Caliban

Roger MacBride Allen

Now They Will Have to Die

James Verini

Successful Negotiating: Letting the Other Person Have Your Way

Ginny Pearson Barnes

Managing Up

Roseanne Badowski

True Compass

Edward Kennedy

Oldies & Goodies

Knowing Mandela

John Carlin

Democracy in America

Alexis De Tocqueville

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

John Adams

David McCullough

On Natural Selection

Charles Darwin

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Bill Gates

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The Federalist

Hamilton, Jay & Madison

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The Demon of Unrest

Erik Larson

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Team of Rivals

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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No Ordinary Time

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela

Ed. Sham Venter

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Mandela: The Authorized Biography

Anthony Sampson

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1776

David McCullough

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Founding Fathers

Gordon Leidner

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Managing Up

Rosanne Badowski

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Think Again

Adam Grant

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Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography

Richard Bellman

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Advice for a Young Investigator

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

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Richard Feynman: A Life in Science

John & Mary Gribblin

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Made to Stick

Chip Heath & Dan Heath

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Profiles in Courage

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

This web presence was last updated on Tue, Mar 10, 2026.