Towards Collaborative Autonomy in Multi-robot Systems: From Swarm Defense to Human-Robot Collaboration

Multi-robot systems can significantly expand our ability to operate in complex and hazardous environments, from disaster response and environmental monitoring to national security. Achieving this requires robotic teams that are scalable, resilient, and capable of safe collaboration with each other and with humans. In this talk, I will present my research toward advancing such autonomous multi-robot systems. I begin with my research work on adversarial swarm defense, where I developed a unified framework that enables defender robots to protect safety-critical areas against both risk-averse and risk-taking adversarial swarms. This framework leverages real-time monitoring of adversarial swarm behavior, optimal task assignment, and trajectory planning for coordinated defense, combining herding and collision-aware interception to collaboratively mitigate a wide range of adversarial behaviors.
I then highlight my broader efforts to enable reliable autonomy in real-world settings, including human-multi-robot collaboration, motion planning for tethered robots in extreme terrains, and automated ROS2-based integration testing pipelines for PX4 UAVs. Together, these contributions reflect a cohesive and ongoing research direction toward building reliable multi-robot systems that operate safely, effectively, and collaboratively amid uncertainty and real-world constraints.

Speaker : Vishnu S. Chipade

Biography:

Vishnu S. Chipade is a Senior Researcher at the Secure Systems Research Center, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi. He received his PhD and Master’s degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA and Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. His research focuses on developing scalable and reliable multi-robot systems that operate safely, securely, and collaboratively with robots and humans in complex real-world environments, leveraging the best of classical and AI-driven approaches to autonomy. His research has been published in top venues such as T-RO, TCNS, ICRA, IROS, CDC, etc.