Mission and Purpose

DIRECT Lab strives to improve quality of life by developing intelligent systems capable of assisting humans operating in a complex and uncertain world.

About the Lab

USU’s DIRECT lab covers a vast swath of research: Decision Intelligence, Robotics, Electrified Transportation, Embedded Systems, and Cooperative Technologies. Founded by Dr. Mario, the lab strives to expand and unite research in applied AI, especially for electrified transportation and autonomous systems. Almost everything we do, we build software: we apply decision intelligence and software development to the other fields. Current research is applied in financial markets, power electronics, transportation infrastructure, human behavior, and robotics. The DIRECT lab also focuses on outreach and providing opportunities for underserved communities to participate in research.

Some of our primary Reserach Topics and Activities include:

• Decision Intelligence: Understanding principles that allow human-like decision making in uncertain environments with limited information

• Robotics: Design of intelligence hierarchy and architectures to quickly learn and adapt on all types of robots

• Electrified Transportation: Intelligent clean energy autonomy for transportation, cities, and infrastructure

• Outreach: Building ties to communities and future researchers

News

• June 2026: Our paper “A Framework for Scalable Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning in IsaacLab” by Isaac Peterson, Christopher Allred, Jacob Morrey and Mario Harper was accepted into IROS 2026! You can read the preprint here.

• June 2026: Our poster “eVTOL for Regional Travel in the State of Utah” by Chandler Justice and Mario Harper was accepted into the ITSC 2026 Late Breaking poster session

• April 2026: Our paper “Multi-modal Detection and Attribution Algorithm for Low Power Edge Compute Hardware” by Maggie Michelsen, Jackson Gardner, Shawn Jones, Jackson Kulik, and Mario Harper was accepted into SmallSat2026.

• April 2026: Our paper “Advanced AI Deployment on SmallSats: A Mixed-Precision Approach” by Maggie Michelsen, Jackson Gardner, Shawn Jones, Jackson Kulik, and Mario Harper was accepted into SmallSat2026.

• March 2026: Dr. Mario Harper received the Researcher of the Year award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Utah State.

• Dec 2025: Christopher Allred has successfully defended his PhD dissertation Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Learning for Robotic Systems: A Framework for Coordinated Competitive Behaviors. No revisions requested!