Cagri Kilic

As a Research Assistant Professor at West Virginia University, my primary research focus lies in advancing the field of space robotics, emphasizing the development of computationally efficient state estimation techniques. I explore cooperative localization, perception, planning, and robot-terrain interactions for multi-robot systems in challenging and visually constrained environments. My Ph.D. research in Aerospace Engineering at WVU was focused on space robotics localization applications using terramechanics relations with inertial sensors. Through my Ph.D. studies, I worked on improving localization for Lunar and Martian rovers by performing field tests on planetary analog environments. I'm a past recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, WVU Statler Fellowship, Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Research Grant, and Caltech's NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory JVSRP Fellowship. I received my M.Sc. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where I studied the orbital mission analyses of CubeSats. I was a graduate researcher at the Space Systems Design and Test Laboratory (SSDTL) at ITU. My work at SSDTL was related to trajectory optimization and orbital dynamics simulations. I graduated with a B.Sc. degree in Astronautical Engineering from ITU. During my undergraduate studies, I was a team leader of the first Turkish can-sized microsatellite (CanSat) team and the MERIT award owner. In my senior year, I participated in QB50, the international network of a CubeSats project, as a Short Training Program student with a scholarship for the development and deployment strategies for QB50 at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI), Belgium.