Brett Barkley

I am a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin advised by David Fridovich-Keil.

I was previously employed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where I worked on AI-based autonomy for aerospace systems.

I have an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland where I was a research assistant under Prof. Derek Paley and member of the Collective Dynamics and Control Laboratory (CDCL). My area of specialization was flight dynamics, stability, and control and my thesis proposed a scalable cooperative autonomy framework for multi-agent aerial reconnaissance.

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Research Interest

I am broadly interested in developing theory and algorithms that democratize performant deep reinforcement learning and enhance its sustainability when applied to robotic systems. Specifically, I believe this can be accomplished by integrating the three Rs of waste management (reduce, reuse, recycle) into the lifecycle of agent training, validation, and deployment. There are a number of open directions for this work, but I am particularly excited about the promise of this concept in generating generalizable AI at reduced computational cost.

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