- New preprint: verifiable deterministic world models
- STL CoT confidence = most innovative poster
- New preprint: statistical-symbolic verification of perception
- ECE showcases new club: Gator Autonomous Racing
- New preprint: a survey of CPS assumptions
- Ivan does publicity for a neuro-symbolic conference
- Jordan presents V&V for vision-based systems at ATVA
- AutoGators win Most Innovative @ Autonomy Hackaton
- IROS showcase: world models, image repair, data cleaning
- Trevor and Jordan win student research awards at ESWEEK
- Demos at HWCOE celebration and dean’s tailgate
- New preprint: online friction estimation for racing
- Ivan presents conservative perception abstractions at Allerton
- New preprint: unified V&V for vision systems
- Ivan talks about high-dimensional verification at USC
- New NSF project on verifiable safety under visual shifts
- New preprint: how safe will I be given what I saw?
- TEA Lab hosts incoming freshmen
- Ivan talks about conformal reachability at CAV
- Our world models are taking off
- New NSF project on confidence calibration under anomalies
- New preprint: chain-of-thought confidence with STL
- Ivan presents principles of world modeling at NeuS 2025
- Zhongzheng and Yuyang give racing demo to Nelms family
- Jordan & Ivan present world models at ICRA 2025
- Jordan and Ivan present at CPS-IoT Week 2025
- Lorant wins the student leader and best poster awards
- Carson & Lorant present at the UF Spring Symposium
- New preprint: conservative perception abstractions
- Ivan receives the NSF CAREER Award
- New preprint: generalizable image repair
- New preprint: principles for interpretable world models
- New preprint: state-based conformal prediction
- TEA lab does double racing demos for Spring Visit
- New preprint: stratified neuro-symbolic architecture
- Ivan co-chairs the poster/demo session at ICCPS 2025
- Ivan co-chairs the poster/demo session at ICCPS 2025
- New preprint: physically interpretable world models
- MANY posters, demos, awards at NELMS IoT conference
- Two surveys: neuro-symbolic AIoT and CPS sustainability
- Sam, Yuang, Zhenjiang present posters at UF AI Days 2024
- Ivan presents calibrated visual safety prediction at TACPS workshop at ESWEEK
- Yuang presents high-dimensional reachability at FM 2024
- Zhenjiang presents calibrated safety predictors at L4DC 2024
- New NSF project on neuro-symbolic perception in CPS
- Ivan spends summer at AFRL as a visiting faculty
- Zhenjiang presents two papers and a poster at ICRA 2024
- Ivan presents NN repair with preservation at ICCPS 2024
- Language-enhanced OOD detection: new preprint online
- F1/10 racing demo for the ECE External Advisory Board
- First batch of students finishes the CURE racing course
- Foundation world models: new preprint online
- TEA Lab moves to Malachowsky Hall
- Verifying high-dimensional controllers: new preprint online
- Ivan participates in a panel on dependable space autonomy
- Ivan serves on the PC of ICCPS’24 and AAAI’24
- How safe am I given what I see? New preprint online
- Invited talk at the DACPS workshop & ETH Autonomy Talks
- TEA Lab hosts K-12 students for the Robotics-AIoT Visit Day
- Causal NN controller repair presented at ICAA’23
- Conservative safety monitoring presented at NFM’23
- DonkeyCars are racing autonomously
- Ivan Ruchkin to serve on the PC of ICCPS’23
- TEA Lab is established
Recent News
- STL CoT confidence = most innovative poster
Zhenjiang and Ani presented a poster with their work on chain-of-thought confidence with signal temporal logic at the Annual Nelms IoT Conference. The core idea of this research is to find patterns in LLM confidence that tend to correlate with correct and incorrect answers. Then, these patterns can be used to determine the confidence, i.e., the chance of the LLM providing the correct answer.
Zhenjiang and Ani at their poster They were awarded the Most Innovative Poster Award by UF Innovate, which included a $500 cash prize. Congratulations!
In the meantime, a couple of other fun events happened around that time:
Richard Yang and Sriram Yerramsetty gave a demo of autonomous Roboracer overtaking at the Nelms Conference 
Gator Autonomous Racing hosted its first Build Day to start making a new crop of autonomous racing cars - ECE showcases new club: Gator Autonomous Racing
This semester marks a major development: the Gator Autonomous Racing (GAR) student club/design team was officially spun off from the TEA Lab.
This week, the club has put together an impressive showcase with two racing cars (F1/tenth, aka RoboRacer) in the middle of Malachowsky Hall. The demonstration has attracted a lot of attention!
A huge thanks to these guys for putting the showcase together:
- Ivan does publicity for a neuro-symbolic conference
Ivan Ruchkin is serving as the publicity chair of the 3rd International Conference on Neuro-Symbolic Systems (NeuS) 2026.
Looking forward to your submissions!
- Demos at HWCOE celebration and dean’s tailgate
The TEA Lab and the newly formed Gator Autonomous Racing (GAR) club collaborated on two back-to-back demos:
- A camera-based DonkeyCar demo for the 10th year anniversary of the naming of UF engineering by Herbert Wertheim. This demo on October 3 was led by Zhongzheng Zhang and Tyler Ruble.
- A lidar-based RoboRacer demo for the Dean’s tailgate before the UF-UT Austin football game. This demo on October 4 was led by Ruben Gonzalez-Vera, Sriram Yerramsetty, Richard Yang, and Christopher Oeltjen.
Congrats to the students on successfully demoing our autonomous racing technology!
- TEA Lab hosts incoming freshmen
This summer, the TEA Lab welcomed a group of incoming UF freshmen as part of the STEPUP (the Successful Transition and Enhanced Preparation for Undergraduates program). The visiting students learned about the importance of safe and trustworthy autonomy, got to poke around the autonomous racing cars, and asked great questions!
- Our world models are taking off
Our recent dive into world models is blossoming in several intriguing directions: multimodality, hallucinations, and modular verification. While we’re pushing these directions forward, take a look at a nice overview article about our research on world models.
- Zhongzheng and Yuyang give racing demo to Nelms family
Thanks to Yuyang and Zhongzheng for impressing the visitors from the generous Nelms family on a new racing track! - TEA lab does double racing demos for Spring Visit
Great job to those who put together the demos for the ECE and MAE Spring Visits, particularly Zhongzheng and the F1/10 team! - MANY posters, demos, awards at NELMS IoT conference
Congratulations to many students from TEA lab presenting their work and getting recognition!
Demos
Mrinall and Sam show off their DonkeyCar 
Mrinall and Sam show off their DonkeyCar 
Lorant, Carson, Chris, and Anthony show off their F1/10 car 
Lorant, Carson, Chris, and Anthony show off their F1/10 car Posters
Sam and his work on language-enhanced OOD detection 
Yuang and his work on high-dimensional verification 
Zhenjiang and his work on interpretable world models Awards
First place for the F1/10 demo 
First place for the F1/10 demo 
First place for the F1/10 demo 
2nd Place for Zhenjiang’s poster 
2nd Place for Zhenjiang’s poster 
2nd Place for Zhenjiang’s poster 
Honorable Mention for Sam’s poster 
Honorable Mention for Sam’s poster 
Honorable Mention for Yuang’s poster - Sam, Yuang, Zhenjiang present posters at UF AI Days 2024
On October 29, 2024, the three students presented posters about the following papers:- Zhenjiang Mao, Dong-You Jhong, Ao Wang, Ivan Ruchkin. Language-Enhanced Latent Representations for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Autonomous Driving [Arxiv] [Slides]. Robot Trust for Symbiotic Societies (RTSS) Workshop (co-located with ICRA 2024), Yokohama, Japan, 2024.
- Zhenjiang Mao, Siqi Dai, Yuang Geng, Ivan Ruchkin. Zero-shot Safety Prediction for Autonomous Robots with Foundation World Models [Arxiv] [Poster]. Back to the Future: Robot Learning Going Probabilistic Workshop (co-located with ICRA 2024), Yokohama, Japan, 2024.
- Yuang Geng, Jake Brandon Baldauf, Souradeep Dutta, Chao Huang, Ivan Ruchkin. Bridging Dimensions: Confident Reachability for High-Dimensional Controllers [Arxiv] [Springer] [Github] [Poster 1] [Poster 2] [Slides] [Demo (w/ subs)] [Demo (w/o subs)] [Talk]. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM), Milan, Italy, 2024.
- Ivan spends summer at AFRL as a visiting faculty
For Summer 2024, Ivan Ruchkin will join the Visiting Faculty Research Program (VFRP) at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate (RI) in Rome, NY. The program is organized by the Griffis Institute. Ivan will work on advancing safety verification for high-dimensional controllers. He will also participate in the cyber assurance group’s efforts on testing and assurance for learning-enabled systems. - F1/10 racing demo for the ECE External Advisory Board
Industry leaders visited the ECE department to witness the variety of work happening here. Thanks to everyone who helped, especially Carson Sobolewski and Lorant Domokos who led the demonstration. Some videos and photos from the event:
- First batch of students finishes the CURE racing course
Congratulations to the nine freshmen participants: Ramsey Makan, Jonas Dickens, Tyler Ruble, Christopher Oeltjen, Carter Amaba, Aditya Gandhi, Emilia Delaune, Ethan Krol, and Giancarlo Vidal! And a big thank you to the mentors: Ao Wang, Sam Jhong, Lorant Domokos, and Carson Sobolewski. More information on this CURE course is here. - Ivan participates in a panel on dependable space autonomy
- Ivan serves on the PC of ICCPS’24 and AAAI’24
Consider submitting your papers there. - TEA Lab hosts K-12 students for the Robotics-AIoT Visit Day
On June 15, 2023, the UF ECE Department hosted ~30 school students from the Westwood Middle School and Buchholz High School for a day visit at the Robotics, AI, and IoT research laboratories for educational presentations, research demonstrations, and mentoring discussions. It was a lot of fun for everyone!
Photos from the event Kudos to the other participating labs: SmartDATA Lab, RoboPI Lab, WISE Lab
- DonkeyCars are racing autonomously
Our lab is now running neural network-controlled racing cars based on raw camera images: Sometimes things don’t go as planned: Such is the brittle nature of deep learning. We’ll be working on predicting and preventing such accidents. - Ivan Ruchkin to serve on the PC of ICCPS’23
