Welcome!
I am a PhD Candidate in Autonomous Systems at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Prof. Zachary Sunberg and Prof. Morteza Lahijanian. My goal is to enable safety-critical autonomous partially observable cyber-physical systems under uncertainty to complete complex temporal tasks while providing explicit guarantees on their safety and operational properties. Recently, my focus has been on developing theoretically sound and practically efficient algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty in safety-critical robotics and autonomous systems. This often involves combining techniques from formal methods (temporal logics, hybrid systems), probabilistic modeling and planning (MDPs, POMDPs, Stochastic Games), and reinforcement learning. My research finds applications in diverse areas such as self-driving cars, uncrewed aerial vehicles, space robotic systems, underwater vehicles, smart grids, and operations research.
I'm joining the Virginia Tech Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Spring 2026!
I'm actively hiring highly motivated Ph.D. students to pursue cutting-edge research in decision-making under uncertainty for autonomous systems. If you're interested in joining my lab, please contact me at: qihengho [at] vt.edu.
Experience
Education
- Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering Sciences (Autonomous Systems), University of Colorado Boulder, 2025 (expected)
- M.S. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences (Autonomous Systems), University of Colorado Boulder, 2023
- B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 2019
Work experience
- 2024-2025: Visiting Student Researcher
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- 2020-2025: Graduate Research Assistant
- University of Colorado Boulder
- 2019-2020: Research Engineer
- Future Urban Mobility, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
Research: Assured Autonomous Systems
My research focuses on designing Assured Autonomous Systems that operate safely and reliably with uncertainty, partial observability, and incomplete information. I am broadly interested in the theoretical analysis, designing efficient algorithms and practical techniques for:
- Decision-making under uncertainty (MDPs, POMDPs, Games)
- Motion planning under uncertainty
- Temporally extended tasks (Temporal Logic specifications, Non-Markovian objectives, long horizon sparse reward problems)
- Formal synthesis and verification
- Multi-layered autonomoous system architectures
- Data-driven models for planning, reinforcement Learning for POMDPs
- Applications in robotics and space systems
Recent Publications
Below are a few recent highlights. For a complete list and access to all papers, please visit my Publications page.
- Perrault, N., Ho, Q. H., & Lahijanian, M. (2025). Kino-PAX: Highly Parallel Kinodynamic Sampling-based Planner. Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
- Muvvala, K., Ho, Q. H., & Lahijanian, M. (2025). Beyond Winning Strategies: Admissible and Admissible Winning Strategies for Quantitative Reachability Games. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
- Ho, Q. H., Feather, M., Rossi, F., Sunberg, Z., & Lahijanian, M. (2024). Sound and Efficient Algorithms for POMDPs with Reachability Objectives via Heuristic Search. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).
- Ho, Q. H., Becker, T., Kraske, B., Laouar, Z., Feather, M., Rossi, F., Sunberg, Z., & Lahijanian, M. (2024). Recursively-Constrained Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).
- Ho, Q. H., Sunberg, Z., & Lahijanian, M. (2023). Planning with SiMBA: Motion Planning under Uncertainty for Temporal Goals using Simplified Belief Guides. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
- Ho, Q. H., Sunberg, Z., & Lahijanian, M. (2022). Gaussian Belief Trees for Chance Constrained Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
- Luo*, Y., Meghjani*, M., Ho*, Q. H., Hsu, D., & Rus, D. (2021). Interactive Planning for Autonomous Urban Driving in Adversarial Scenarios. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).