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Keaton Safu was 9 when his mom brought home his first Star Wars Lego set. He poured out a scatter of pieces, smoothed out the instruction booklet and clicked his way forward until he was holding an Imperial starship. 

“It wasn’t the biggest one,” said Safu — nothing like the hulking collector ships that eat dining-room tables — “but it was definitely like I had a spaceship in my hands.” 

Dozens of Lego sets, STEM courses and design projects later, Safu is finishing his mechanical engineering degree at Cal State Long Beach while working in the College of Engineering’s future-forward — ������'s new testbed for multi-agent systems, where student–written code sends collaborative drones and robots into motion as high-tech cameras track everything in real time.

How PACK labs work

Named for the way wolves move together, PACK (Perception, Actuation, Control and Network) focuses on swarms of drones and fleets of vehicles that sense one another and make intelligent decisions together without a central computer. Think merging vehicles that negotiate the right of way, much like flocks of birds changing course midair. 

The potential applications are as varied as they are exciting: fewer traffic collisions, faster environmental monitoring, smarter search-and-rescues, safer wildfire response. 

That last one hits home for Safu. 

“We just saw the Palisades and Eaton fires,” said Safu, who grew up in Cerritos, less than 40 miles from burn zones. “What might have happened if you had an autonomous network of drones that could fly over those fires and extinguish them? You're minimizing the risk at that point. That makes the job safer for everybody involved and potentially changes the outcome of the situation.” 

Where talent takes off

Backed by a recent Department of Defense grant, PACK Lab Director Tairan Liu (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering) and Associate Professor Oscar Morales-Ponce (Computer Engineering & Computer Science) have built out a scaled, netted flight cage with research-grade AUVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), ground vehicles, a micro-swarm, an optical motion-tracking system and an indoor range for multi-car scenarios.  

What students do with it is the point. Undergrads turn class concepts into working systems — designing the logic that guides a robot’s decisions, testing it on hardware and running experiments that translate directly to internships, jobs and graduate study.  

“I will design new lectures for my students to do some hands-on learning [and] design on their own,” Liu said. “We follow… physics rules, procedures, quality control. We do things in a systematic way.” 

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Building more than robots

Fourth-year computer engineering student Fozhan Babaeyian Ghamsari works closely with Morales-Ponce to develop distributed-computing frameworks that let robots reach agreement when possible and default to safety when communications break down.

“The idea is not to rely on a central computer or somebody that is assigning the movements,” Morales-Ponce said. “The idea is that they will work independently [and have] the intelligence to react, to agree on what they are doing and avoid crashing.”

In the lab, Babaeyian Ghamsari is programming a humanoid robot to follow spoken instructions like "bring me the red ball" — navigating, searching, locating objects and adjusting behavior when things go wrong. Although still an undergrad, she has co-authored papers earned multiple student research awards for her work — underscoring how quickly students are turning PACK Lab access into real results.

And the bench keeps deepening, Liu said.  

“In the past three years, I have mentored more than 50 students," he said, including an undergrad who was admitted straight into a PhD program at University of Notre Dame. 

For students like Safu, who plans to pursue a master’s next, that trajectory matters. 

“It always feels like I'm in a sci-fi movie,” he said of his time in the PACK Lab, turning futuristic ideas into fixes for real, complex problems that could make the world safer. “That's what makes me feel like everything that I'm studying is worth it.”