Dr. Aliasghar Arab is a Research Associate at the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York(CCNY) and is affiliated with the CUNY Remote Sensing Earth Systems Institute (CREST). He also serves as the Director of the Agile Safe Autonomous Systems (ASAS) Robotics Labs, where he leads research at the intersection of safe autonomy, embodied artificial intelligence, and control-theoretic verification for robotic and autonomous systems.

Dr. Arab plays an active role in education and mentorship at CCNY and NYU, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses including Autonomous Mobile Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, and advanced courses in modeling, control and planning, analytical dynamics, and machine design. Through his academic leadership, he has supervised and mentored a large cohort of graduate students working on safety-critical autonomy, human–robot interaction, and AI-enabled control systems.

With extensive industry experience, Dr. Arab has held senior research and leadership roles at Verizon, Nokia Bell Labs, and Nuro, where he contributed to the design, verification, and deployment of safety-critical autonomous and robotic systems. His work spans edge computing and 5G-enabled autonomy, quantum-safe and fault-tolerant robotic planning, and operational design domain (ODD)–aware safety architectures for autonomous vehicles. He also spent a year conducting applied research in North Carolina, focusing on safety analysis and resilient autonomy in real-world robotic systems.

Dr. Arab is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Technical Committee Member for UL Standards (UL4601, UL4600, UL3300, UL3100), contributing to the development and evaluation of safety standards for autonomous and robotic systems, including industry-wide frameworks for verification and certification. His professional service reflects a sustained commitment to translating rigorous research into deployable, standards-aligned technologies.

An alumnus of the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, Dr. Arab has served as an Entrepreneurial Lead (EL) and was the recipient of the National NSF I-Corps “Trust the Process” Award, recognizing excellence in technology translation and customer discovery. His work has further been recognized through the Bell Labs Best Research Award, the NYU Technology Acceleration Center (TAC) Award, the NJEDA Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology (CSIT) Award, and the CUNY AI Innovation Award.

PhD in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (Control Systems), May, 2021; Rutgers University

• Thesis: Safe motion control and planning for autonomous racing vehicles

BS/MS in Robotics Engineering May, 2013; Shah University of Technology

• Thesis: Robust Control of a Mobile Robots

1. Proactive Hierarchical Control Barrier Function–Based Constraint Prioritization to Enhance Safety in Human–Robot Interaction, Control Engineering Practice, 2026.

2. Motion Planning and Control of an Overactuated Four-Wheel Drive with Constrained Independent Steering, IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), 2025.

3. Transparent Social Navigation for Autonomous Mobile Robots via Vision–Language Models, IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2025.

4. Virtual Fencing for Safer Cobots, IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2025.

5. Motion Planning and Control of Autonomous Aggressive Vehicle Maneuvers, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 2024.

 Full List of Publications on Google Scholar