Events

Computer Science Department Colloquium Multi-Agent Autonomy: From Interaction-Aware Navigation to Coordinated Mobile Manipulation
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Speaker: Prof. Javier Alonso-Mora (Delft University of Technology)

Bio

Javier Alonso-Mora is a Full Professor in the Cognitive Robotics Department at Delft University of Technology, where he leads the Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems Lab and serves as Director of the TU Delft Robotics Institute. He received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, in partnership with Disney Research Zurich, and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co‑chairs the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Multi‑Robot Systems and serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Autonomous Robots, as well as for several major robotics conferences.

His research focuses on autonomous mobile robotics, with an emphasis on navigation, motion planning, learning, and control. Key application areas include mobile manipulation, autonomous vehicles, aerial robotics, on‑demand mobility, and multi‑robot coordination in dynamic, human‑shared environments. His awards include an NWO VENI Talent Scheme Award (2017), the ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi‑Robot Systems (2019), an ERC Starting Grant (2021), the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award (2024), and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award (2025). His research on ride‑pooling has led to the creation of a commercial spin‑off company, The Routing Company.

Location : Room 403, 4th floor, 1 Spring Street, Downtown New Brunswick

Committee: 

Event Type: Computer Science Department Colloquium

Abstract: In the pursuit of scalable, socially aware, and safety-critical autonomous systems, our recent research has focused on integrating learning, planning, and control across aerial, ground, and maritime robotic platforms. Central to this effort is the fusion of model-based and data-driven approaches, enabling robust decision-making in dynamic and uncertain environments, seamless multi-robot coordination, and the ability to learn from human demonstrations. This talk will highlight recent advances in three key areas: 1) interaction-aware navigation among other robots and humans, using sampling-based model predictive control, socially compliant behavior learning, and semantic mapping; 2) real-time task and motion planning for teams of mobile manipulators through expert demonstrations, physically grounded plans, and whole-body control; and 3) decentralized 6-DoF manipulation of cable-suspended loads by a team of drones using multi-agent reinforcement learning. These contributions advance the frontier of scalable autonomy in dynamic, multi-agent environments across diverse robotic platforms.

Organization: 

Contact  Professor Lirong Xia

Zoom: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/96878250482?pwd=quXa2sakRuxK9fGwaQyOaugJRKSf1O.1