Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, August 2025
M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, May 2025
B.S., Electrical Engineering with a Computer Option and Math Minor, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, May 2020
Research
Mobile exploratory robots and manipulation robots – tensegrity robots, soft robots, and wheeled robots
Modeling and simulation of complex systems
Machine learning and artificial intelligence
Multi-modal semantic segmentation
Image processing and computer vision
Selected Publications
L. Ervin, H. Bezawada, and V. Vikas, “Improving Grip Stability Using Passive Compliant Microspine Arrays for Soft Robots in Unstructured Terrain,” IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Jan. 2025, won Best Paper Award at the IEEE ICRA Soft Robotics for Space Applications Workshop.
L. Ervin, M. Eastepp, M. McVicker, and K. Ricks, “Evaluation of Semantic Segmentation Performance for Multimodal Roadside Vehicle Detection System on the Edge,” Sensors 2025, 25, 370. https://doi.org/10.3390/s25020370
L. Ervin and V. Vikas, “Geometric Static Modeling Framework for Piecewise-Continuous Curved-Link Multi Point-of-Contact Tensegrity Robots,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 9, no. 12, pp. 11066-11073, Dec. 2024, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2024.3486199.
M. McVicker, L. Ervin, Y. Yang, and K. G. Ricks, “Comparison of lidar semantic segmentation performance on the structured SemanticKITTI and off-road RELLIS-3D datasets,” International Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications, Aug. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s41315-024-00376-5.
M. Eastepp, L. Faris, and K. Ricks, “UA_L-DoTT: University of Alabama’s large dataset of trains and trucks,” Data in Brief, vol. 42, p. 108073, Jun. 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2022.108073.
