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Research · Group 05

Many agents, one mission.

Real missions aren't flown by one machine. This group studies coordinated autonomy across air, land, and sea — shared communication, distributed planning, and resilient behavior when links drop, agents fail, and the environment fights back.

The work

How this group works.

The methods and commitments that define the lab's approach to the problem.

Multi-agent coordination

Teams, not soloists

Planning and control for fleets that divide tasks, cover area, and adapt as a group.

Comms-aware autonomy

Coordinating over a lossy link

Behavior that degrades gracefully when bandwidth is scarce and the relay keeps changing — including who relays for whom.

Distributed planning

No single point of failure

Decisions spread across the fleet, so the mission survives the loss of any one agent.

Cross-domain teaming

Air, land, and sea

Heterogeneous platforms sharing one picture of the mission and one communications fabric.

Current directions

Open problems we're pursuing.

The questions the lab is taking on now — each a gap between what works in a demo and what works in the world.

D1

Relay and hand-off

How a fleet keeps a connected mesh as agents move and links break — and proves it stayed connected.

D2

Coverage under uncertainty

Coordinated search and survey when the map is wrong and the team is incomplete.

D3

Resilient formations

Formations that reform around failure instead of falling apart.

Join this group

Lead this group, or join it.

Step into the principal-investigator role through the Physical AI Investigator Program — an independent appointment with PI authority — or join the group as a research intern.

Bridge to independence

Physical AI Investigator Program

An independent investigator appointment and PI authority to lead a research line in this group — built to position you for early-career funding.

Research in this group can spin out into a company — explore Launch →