Ali Jadbabaie

About

Ali Jadbabaie is a prominent researcher whose work sits at the intersection of multi-agent systems, distributed control, and robotic coordination. His most influential contributions address fundamental challenges in how groups of autonomous robots can coordinate motion, maintain communication, and form complex formations without relying on centralized control. Jadbabaie's most celebrated work focuses on distributed motion coordination for nonholonomic robots, including vision-based control laws that enable robots to achieve parallel and balanced circular formations through consensus-based approaches — work that has garnered over 228 citations. Complementing this, his research on flocking with network connectivity preservation (212 citations) and connectivity management in mobile robot teams (168 citations) established rigorous frameworks ensuring that communication links between agents are maintained even as robots move dynamically through environments. His contributions extend to second-order agent systems, where he addressed the theoretical foundations of connectivity maintenance in ad-hoc robotic networks (125 citations). More recently, Jadbabaie has explored combinatorial optimization problems in large-scale systems, including resilient non-submodular maximization and near-optimal sensor scheduling for state estimation, reflecting a broadening research agenda toward scalable, resource-constrained systems. Across his career, his work has provided both theoretical foundations and practical algorithms that continue to shape modern multi-robot systems research.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Vision-Based, Distributed Control Laws for Motion Coordination of Nonholonomic Robots

   228 citations · 2009
2. 2
   Flocking while preserving network connectivity

   212 citations · 2007
3. 3
   Connectivity management in mobile robot teams

   168 citations · 2008
4. 4
   Maintaining limited-range connectivity among second-order agents

   125 citations · 2006
5. 5
   Resilient Non-Submodular Maximization over Matroid Constraints

   28 citations · 2018
6. 6
   Bearing-Only Control Laws For Balanced Circular Formations of Ground Robots

   25 citations · 2008
7. 7
   Towards simplicial coverage repair for mobile robot teams

   9 citations · 2010
8. 8
   A duality approach to path planning for multiple robots

   7 citations · 2010
9. 9
   Near-optimal sensor scheduling for batch state estimation: Complexity, algorithms, and limits

   5 citations · 2016
10. 10
    Path planning for multiple robots: An alternative duality approach

    4 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links