Research

A research program built on modeling, simulation, and validation — not claims.

01 — RESEARCH FOCUS

Research focus areas

Distributed coordination
Scalable task allocation and consensus for large agent populations under realistic communication constraints.
Multi-agent coordination algorithms
Algorithm development with explicit robustness analysis: behavior under noise, delay, and platform attrition.
Collective intelligence
How local interaction rules produce reliable group-level decisions — and where emergence breaks down.
Swarm robotics
Embodied validation of coordination research on physical platforms, from lab testbeds to field-relevant conditions.
Autonomous mission planning
Decentralized planning that re-allocates objectives as the mission and the swarm change.
Multifunctional swarm hardware
Mass-producible platforms via state-of-the-art additive manufacturing, integrating structural power with electroactive actuation — the hardware complement to decentralized autonomy.

02 — TECHNICAL ROADMAP

THRUST I
Foundations
Decentralized coordination algorithms and the simulation environments to evaluate them: formal models, baseline implementations, repeatable experiments.
THRUST II
Validation
Hardware-in-the-loop testbeds and robustness studies: closing the gap between simulated assumptions and physical sensing, actuation, and communication.
THRUST III
Mission-scale demonstration
Integrated demonstrations of distributed autonomy at mission-relevant scale, supported by the simulation, analysis, and prototyping division for platform analysis.

03 — TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONS

Our work builds on the open research literature in these fields. Publications from active programs will be listed here as they appear.

04 — FUTURE RESEARCH

Heterogeneous swarms
Coordination across mixed platform types with different sensing, mobility, and compute envelopes.
Communication-denied coordination
Maintaining collective behavior when links are jammed, intermittent, or absent.
Human-swarm teaming
Interfaces and authority models that keep a single operator effective over many platforms.