he/him/él

Assistant Professor, CPE Cal Poly SLO

About

I’m Carlos Díaz Alvarenga, an Assistant Professor in the Computer Engineering department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. My teaching centers on autonomous mobile robots (CPE 4160) and computer organization (CPE 2300). My research explores the intersection of robotics, reinforcement learning, and game theory.

My doctoral work included developing algorithms for security games, using Monte Carlo Tree Search for vineyard robots, and optimizing trajectories for teams of robots.

Research and Lab

The core of my past research centers on the Patrolling Game (Security Game) (AAMAS 2019, ICRA 2020, ICRA 2024). In this model, we analyze optimal strategies for a “defender” against an “intruder” operating with only limited information. Building on this, I’ve employed deep reinforcement learning to generate robust defender strategies capable of generalizing across varied intruder behaviors. I encourage you to look at my publications for more details.

I’m currently studying planning and fault-tolerant perception for teams of diverse robots. This work builds directly on my background in stochastic planning and multi-agent strategic reasoning, applying those principles to ensure robustness in more complex, real-world environments. I’m always happy to discuss my research or teaching. Feel free to drop by my office or send an email.

Recent News

  • December 2025: Congratulations to students Caitlin Osorio & Christopher Tumbokon on being selected as 2026 BEACoN scholars! The pool of applicants was very competitive this year. We look forward to the research ahead.
  • December 2025: Congratulations to lab student Wyatt Colburn for successfully defending his master’s thesis! His research studied the problem of generating a synthetic dataset for supervised learning on a differential drive robot.
  • November 2025: Our proposal “Coordinating Robot-to-Robot Task Handoffs for Heterogeneous Robot Teams” was selected for the Believe, Educate & Empower, Advocate, Collaborate, Nurture (BEACoN) research scholars program at Cal Poly! Thanks to Dr. Matsumoto for the support and insights.
  • November 2025: I served on the program committee for the IFAAMAS International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2026).
  • October 2025: I served as a reviewer for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026).
  • June 2025: Congratulations to lab student Wyatt Colburn for walking the graduation stage! He has been working on an exciting project at the intersection of robotics and machine learning.
  • June 2025: Congratulations to lab students Jay Rajesh and Jorge Ramirez, who will present their work at the BEACoN Symposium this spring! Their posters represent the culmination of two quarters of work building a robot dataset and training an ML model for control.
  • March 2025: This spring quarter, I will be teaching CPE 225: Computer Organization. The course will cover RISC-V architectures and memory management in C, providing students with foundational knowledge in low-level computing.
  • November 2024: Our proposal “Enhancing Autonomous Navigation via Supervised Learning for Robot Motion Control” was selected for the Believe, Educate & Empower, Advocate, Collaborate, Nurture (BEACoN) research scholars program at Cal Poly! Thanks to Dr. Kanjilal for the support and insights.
  • November 2024: I served on the program committee for the IFAAMAS International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025).
  • September 2024: I have joined the Computer Engineering department at California Polytechnic State University as an Assistant Professor.