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Main Research Activities
I am an associate professor in Robotics Engineering, with appointments in Computer Science and Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I direct NEST Lab. The focus of my research is swarm robotics, with applications to fire protection engineering, planetary exploration, and disaster recovery.
If you want to join my lab, please follow these instructions.
- Programming large-scale robot swarms
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NEST Lab is developing Buzz, an innovative programming language specifically designed for real-world robot swarms. Buzz was widely covered in the media, most notably by MIT Technology Review, Communications of the ACM, and RoboHub.
- Human-swarm interaction
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As robots become a part of our daily lives, it will be increasingly important to interact efficiently with teams of robots. NEST Lab is designing innovative, immersive interfaces based on augmented and mixed reality to study how humans and robots can form cohesive teams.
- Accurate, physics-based simulation of robot swarms
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During my Ph.D., I have designed ARGoS, which is currently the fastest general-purpose robot simulator in the literature. ARGoS is used by many laboratories across the world to perform accurate physics-based simulations of large-scale robots swarms. NEST Lab continuously improves ARGoS to suit the diverse needs of the swarm robotics research community.
Editorial Activities
- Conference Chair
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- ANTS2022 (technical chair), ANTS2016 (publication chair)
- MRS2021, MRS2019 (area chair)
- AHS2017 (technical co-chair), AHS2015 (tutorial chair)
- Editor
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- Swarm Intelligence (associate editor, since 2018; guest editor, 2016-2017)
- ICRA (associate editor, since 2020)
- IROS (associate editor, 2016–2022)
- Frontiers Robotics&AI Multi-Robot Systems (guest editor, 2017-2020)
- Program Committee Member (last 3 years)
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- AAMAS2023, AAAI2023
- DARS2022, IJCAI2022, AAAI2022, AAMAS2022, IRMAS@SAC2022
- IJCAI2021, AAAI2021, AAMAS2021, IRMAS@SAC2021, DARS2021, eCAS2021, ARMS2021
- AAAI2020, ARMS@AAMAS20, ANTS2020
Selected Awards and Honors
- Best Paper Award at AAMAS2022.
- 2020 recipient of a Romeo L. Moruzzi Young Faculty Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education
- 2019 recipient of an Amazon Research Award
- 2019 nominee for Best Faculty Advisor Award at WPI
- 2018 Rho Beta Epsilon Award for Excellence in Robotics Education
- 2015 F.R.S.-FNRS Chargé des Recherches, 3-year postdoctoral fellowship
- 2012 winner of the Most Innovative Technology award at the Robot Film Festival for Swarmanoid, the movie
- 2011 winner of the AAAI video competition for Swarmanoid, the movie
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