TECHLAV founded in 2015,  was initially funded by the DoD Air Force Research Laboratory as a Center of Excellence in Autonomy. The center comprises of a strong multi-disciplinary team and synergizes expertise in Control, Communication, and Human Cognition from N.C. A&T and its collaborator, University of Texas San Antonio. TECHLAV as a multi-disciplinary Center of Excellence in Autonomy conducts collaborative and integrated research in the areas of  1) Teaming and Cooperative Control of Large-scale Autonomous Systems of Vehicles (LSASVs) integrated with human operators and, 2)Testing, Evaluation, Validation, and Verification of LSASVs. These thrust areas are met using research activities in following thrusts 1) Thrust-1: Modeling, Analysis and Control of LSASVs, Thrust-2: Resilient Control and Communication for LSASVs and Thrust-3: Testing, Evaluations and Verification of LSASVs. The TECHLAV Center is a recognized national leader in control and autonomy to develop tools, techniques, and algorithms for modelling, analysis, control, coordination, testing, evaluation of large scale systems of autonomous vehicles, and provides advanced education in autonomy related areas.

Dr. Abdollah Homaifar received BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from State University of New York at Stony Brook. He did his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama. His primary areas of research include machine learning, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, stochastic control and estimation, signal processing, robotics, nonlinear control, optimization and microprocessor applications and power electronics. After completing his post-doc at University of Alabama he served as a summer research engineer in AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey as a member of the machine intelligence group. He started working in North Carolina A&T State University in 1989 and is currently working as a Duke Energy Eminent Professor and the director of Autonomous Control and Information Technology (ACIT) Center. He also leads Testing, Evaluation, and Control of Heterogeneous Large Scale systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) which is one of the leading multi-disciplinary Center of Excellence in Autonomy conducts collaborative and integrated research in the areas of control and coordination in the areas of large scale autonomous systems. He has published more than 300 publications in the areas of autonomy, control and estimation and has received numerous awards and honors for his research accomplishments.

Ali Karimoddini received his Bachelor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Iran, in 2003. He then received his Master of Science in Instrumentation and Automation Engineering from Petroleum University of Technology in 2007. In 2008, he joined the National University of Singapore to pursue his Ph.D. degree, and in 2012, he joined the University of Notre Dame to conduct his postdoctoral studies. Dr. Karimoddini is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina A&T State University. His teaching and research interests cover a variety of problems at the intersection of Control, Communication, Computer Science and Life Science. He is currently researching “Testing, evaluation, analysis, control, and decision making for large scale complex systems”, “Robotic swarms”, “Cyber-physical systems”, “Cooperative and distributed control of multi-agent systems”, “Reliable and fault tolerant hybrid control systems”, “Biological systems”, “Aerial robotics”, “Flight control systems”, “Discrete event systems”, “Distributed optimization for coordination of multi-agent systems”, “Hybrid modeling and control”, and the applications to different fields such as smart grids, smart transportation systems, smart farming and cyber security. Dr. Karimoddini is the director of Autonomous Cooperative Control of Emergent Systems of Systems (ACCESS) Lab and the deputy director and research thrust leader of Testing, Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center. He is the recipient of the 2015 Rookie of the year award of NC A&T State University. He is also a senior member of IEEE, and a member of AIAA, ISA, and AHS.