He is a 2009-2012 resident fellow at the Institute on Environment and 2010-2012 McKnight Land-Grant Professor. In 2008, he received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award (CAREER). From 2009 to 2015, he chaired IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Networked Robots. He also served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. His research interests are primarily in robotics, computer vision, sensor networks and geometric algorithms, and their applications in agriculture and environmental monitoring.