His research interests include mobile and cooperative robotics for service tasks, and robot algorithms. He published more than 100 papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops, and he is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) from 2010 to 2014, and an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) from 2015 to 2018. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and regularly served as associate editor or program committee member for the major international conferences in robotics and automation (ICRA, IROS, CASE). From 2006 to 2009 he served as elected executive member of the RoboCup federation. Under his supervision, teams participating in the RoboCupRescue Virtual Robots competition won second place in 2006 and 2008, and first place in 2009. In 2018, he also won the Best Conference Paper Award at the yearly IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).

Since he joined UC Merced his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, USDA, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Lab, the Department of Commerce (NIST), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Microsoft Research, and General Motors.