Multi-Agent Systems: Beyond the Warehouse

Talk: Scalable Planning and Asynchronous Execution for Long-Horizon Multi-Robot Manipulation

Jiaoyang Li is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research develops heuristic search algorithms for multi-agent motion planning and coordination, including multi-agent path finding (MAPF), and combines search with machine learning. Her group's work on scalable imitation learning for lifelong MAPF won the ICRA 2025 Best Student Paper Award and Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems, and she has recently worked on AI for collaborative autonomy and multi-robot systems in manufacturing. She completed her PhD at the University of Southern California.

Website:

https://jiaoyangli.me/

Talk: High-Dimensional Multi-Agent Robot Learning

Guillaume Sartoretti joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an Assistant Professor in 2019, where he founded the Multi-Agent Robotic Motion (MARMot) lab. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), where he worked with Prof. Howie Choset. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from EPFL (Switzerland) in 2016 for his dissertation on "Control of Agent Swarms in Random Environments," under the supervision of Prof. Max-Olivier Hongler. His passion and research lie in understanding and eliciting emergent coordination/cooperation in large multi-agent systems, by identifying what information and mechanisms can help agents reason about their individual role/contribution to each other and to the team. Guillaume was a Manufacturing Futures Initiative (MFI) postdoctoral fellow at CMU in 2018-2019, was awarded an Amazon Research Awards in 2022, as well as an Outstanding Early Career Award from NUS' College of Design and Engineering in 2023. His group's work received best paper awards at DARS in 2021, 2022, and two best paper awards at ICRA 2025.

Website:

https://marmotlab.org

Talk: Deployable Aerial Swarms: From Safe and Efficient Coordination to Language-Based Interaction

SiQi Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, where her research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and control, with the goal of enabling robots to operate safely in unstructured environments. She completed her PhD in robotics at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies and was previously a senior scientist in the Learning Systems and Robotics Lab at the Technical University of Munich. Some of her work in multi-robot systems, such as SwarmGPT and AMSwarm, explores using both control theory and large language models (LLM) to coordinate a swarm of aerial robots. 

Website: https://siqizhou.com/

Talk: Towards High Performance AI-Enabled Robot Manipulation

Stefan Schaal is Director of Science, Research, Robotics, and AI at Intrinsic, an Alphabet company, where his work spans robotics and machine learning for industrial automation, including recent work with Google DeepMind on learning multi-robot coordination. He previously served as Intrinsic's Chief Science Officer and as Director of Robotics at X, the moonshot factory. He was the founding director of the Autonomous Motion Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and a professor of computer science, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California for over two decades

Website: https://stefan-schaal.net/

Talk: Scaling Multi-Agent Systems for the dynamic Outdoors

Dr. Bae is an assistant professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the College of Computing at Michigan Technological University. Prior to this appointment in 2019, she was a research professor for Intelligent Systems and Robotics Laboratory at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea from 2014 to 2019. She received her BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea. She was a research assistant for the Division for Applied Robot Technology in Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH) in Ansan, South Korea in 2007 for a year. She earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Dr. Bae is interested in Robotics, especially with Multi-robot systems. Her research interests includes Coordination of Heterogeneous Robot Teams, Vehicle Routing Problems, Multi-robot System Control and Optimization, and Autonomous Navigation. Her main goal of research is development of operational strategy for multi-agent autonomous vehicle systems. 

Website: https://sites.google.com/mtu.edu/irosol/

Talk: Multi-Agent Space Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Dr. Manoranjan Majji earned his Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2009. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in mechanics, control, systems analysis, estimation of dynamical systems and astrodynamics. He developed an undergraduate aerospace engineering mechanics course, developed or co-developed five new graduate classes in the college of engineering. He received the Milton Plesur award for excellence in teaching from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Dr. Majji’s research focuses on computational vision, alternative positioning and navigation systems, tensegrity systems and aerospace robotics. His fundamental contributions are documented in over 180 publications (including 49 journal articles). He has chaired or co- chaired twelve doctoral committees, eighteen masters committees and served on twenty eight other graduate committees. His graduates are leading research in major corporations, startups, national laboratories, and universities. Dr. Majji received the New Investigator Award from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in 2014, Dean of Engineering Excellence award (Assistant Professor) in 2021, and the TEES Faculty Fellow award in 2023. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society (AAS). 

Website: https://lasr.tamu.edu/

Talk: From Beaver Canals to Robot Earthworks: Environment-Mediated Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems

Dr. Degani is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He heads the CEAR Lab – Civil, Environmental, and Agricultural Robotics Lab which focuses on dynamic locomotion, minimalism and autonomous systems in unstructured environments with applications such as search and rescue and agriculture. Before coming to the Technion Dr. Degani did his MSc, PhD and Postdoc at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA. At the Robotics Institute he worked in the Manipulation Lab and the Bio-Robotics lab, supervised by Howie Choset and Matt Mason. Dr. Degani's main interests are Locomotion and Manipulation (mainly control and planning of dynamic moving mechanisms), Kinematics (singularity analysis of parallel mechanisms), Mechanical design (medical mechanisms), other medical applications (knee pathology classifications) and more…

Website: https://cear.net.technion.ac.il/

PhD Student in Robotics

Carnegie Mellon University

Anoop's research deals with traveling salesman problems (TSP) and vehicle routing problems (VRP) involving moving targets and obstacles. 

Federico Oliva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Civil, Environmental, and Agricultural Robotics Lab (CEAR) at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, focusing on multi-agent active localization and robotic aggregate formation techniques. He holds a Master's in Automation Engineering from Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna (2017-2020), where he graduated with honors. He completed his Ph.D. at Università di Roma Tor Vergata (2020-2023) in Computer Science, Control, and Geoinformation, focusing on nonlinear observers and system identification.

Github: https://github.com/fedeoli