ET’s Hu Receives NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award

Bin Hu, an assistant professor of Computer Engineering Technology in the Department of Engineering Technology at the Cullen College of Engineering, has received an award from NVIDIA in support of his research.

His project, “Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Waste Detection with Conformal Runtime Monitoring,” was selected for the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Academic Grant Program Award. The goal of the program is to advance academic research by providing world-class computing access and resources to researchers. It is a competitive process open to full-time faculty members at Ph.D. granting institutions.

“I am honored to receive this support from NVIDIA,” Hu said. “This award will help us accelerate our research in edge AI, robotics and autonomous systems by providing the computing resources needed to move our work from laboratory development toward real-world deployment. It is also meaningful because this project reflects the contributions of our students and alumni, and highlights the impact of applied AI research at the University of Houston.”

According to Hu, his project uses a multi-robot system — consisting of an aerial drone, a Clearpath Jackal UGV and a Unitree Go2 quadruped — for efficient and reliable waste detection in real-world environments.

“The research addresses two major challenges in environmental robotics: robust perception in unstructured, in-the-wild settings and deployment of AI models across platforms with different onboard power and compute constraints,” he said.

“To address these challenges, the project integrates hardware-aware neural architecture search to generate platform-specific detection models and conformal runtime monitoring to quantify uncertainty and support online adaptation in the field.”

Hu also highlighted that the project involves student-led research at UH.

“Tony Tran, my current master’s student and a Computer Engineering Technology alumnus from the Engineering Technology Department, is the co-PI of the project, and the work is based on his master’s thesis,” Hu said.

NVIDIA will provide hardware support, including four RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition GPUs and two Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kits, to help advance the research.

Hu joined the University of Houston in 2022. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2016 and his M.S. in control science and engineering from Zhejiang University in 2010.

For more information on Hu’s research, visit his website. He currently has multiple openings for students interested in learning based control, optimization and machine learning, and their applications in robotics and autonomous vehicles.