FROM MOTION PLANNING TO MULTI-ROBOT AUTONOMY IN CONSTRAINED AND DISCONNECTED ENVIRONMENTS

Autonomous robots operating in challenging environments must make reliable decisions under geometric, dynamic, and environmental constraints. In such settings, motion planning plays a central role in enabling robots to move safely and efficiently through cluttered, narrow, disconnected or uncertain spaces, while balancing feasibility, robustness, and computational efficiency.

This talk will focus on motion planning for quadrotors flight through constrained regions such as narrow windows and cluttered spaces. In the later part of the talk, I will briefly broaden the discussion to autonomy problems beyond single-robot flight, including hierarchical coverage path planning in disconnected regions and terrain-aware balanced area allocation for heterogeneous multi-robot systems. Together, these works highlight how planning methods must scale from vehicle-level motion generation to higher-level coordination and task allocation in challenging operational environments.

Speaker: Dr. Saurabh Upadhyay

Biography:

Saurabh Upadhyay received B.E. degree from SSGMCE, Shegaon in 2009, M.Tech. degree from IIT Guwahati in 2012, and Ph.D. degree from IISc Bengaluru in 2018. He is a Lecturer in Space Engineering at Cranfield University, UK. His research interests lie in mobile robots for extreme environments, with special focus on low onboard resources decision making and ISRU-enabled robot design. He has received A.K. Rao best PhD thesis medal 2018 in Aerospace Engineering at IISc Bengaluru, and he is endorsed as a potential leader/exceptional promise by Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021. He is an IEEE senior member, lifetime AIAA Senior member, and fellow of HEA.