Mac Schwager
Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, Intel (United States), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, California University of Pennsylvania, Polytechnique Montréal
Papers
143
Total Citations
6,049
H-Index
41
About
Mac Schwager is a leading roboticist whose research sits at the intersection of multi-robot systems, distributed control, and autonomous sensing. A faculty member at Stanford University, Schwager has made foundational contributions to how groups of robots coordinate intelligently without centralized oversight. His early work on decentralized adaptive coverage control (2009, 453 citations) established landmark methods for deploying robot networks to optimally sense environments by learning information distributions on the fly — a framework that has shaped an entire generation of multi-robot research. He extended this foundation through Voronoi-based approaches for non-convex environments and the elegant Buffered Voronoi Cell algorithm (2017, 279 citations), which enables provably safe real-time collision avoidance. His work on persistent monitoring (2011, 238 citations) addressed the practically vital challenge of robots continuously servicing dynamic, changing environments. Schwager has also advanced vision-based formation control and information-theoretic sensor fusion for distributed systems, demonstrating consistent depth across problem domains. More recently, his survey on foundation models in robotics (2024, 163 citations) signals his engagement with AI's transformative potential. With numerous papers exceeding 100 citations, Schwager's body of work represents one of the most impactful contributions to modern multi-robot systems research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Decentralized, Adaptive Coverage Control for Networked Robots453 citations · 2009
- 2
- 3Persistent Robotic Tasks: Monitoring and Sweeping in Changing Environments238 citations · 2011
- 4Voronoi coverage of non-convex environments with a group of networked robots218 citations · 2010
- 5
- 6Distributed robotic sensor networks: An information-theoretic approach164 citations · 2012
- 7Foundation models in robotics: Applications, challenges, and the future163 citations · 2024
- 8Distributed Coverage Control with Sensory Feedback for Networked Robots152 citations · 2006
- 9An untethered isoperimetric soft robot145 citations · 2020
- 10Distributed multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments141 citations · 2018