Ethan Stump

About

Ethan Stump is a robotics researcher whose work spans multi-robot systems, communication-aware autonomy, and field robotics, with particular emphasis on enabling reliable robot teams to operate in complex, communication-constrained environments. His most influential contribution, "Connectivity Management in Mobile Robot Teams" (2008, 168 citations), established foundational frameworks for maintaining network connectivity in robot teams using algebraic graph theory metrics such as the Fiedler value — work that has become a cornerstone reference in multi-robot coordination. He extended these ideas through visibility-based deployment strategies and disaster-relief applications, demonstrating a consistent focus on real-world operational constraints. His 2011 paper on persistent surveillance cast the problem as a Vehicle Routing Problem, showcasing his ability to bridge robotics with operations research. More recently, Stump has contributed to subterranean robotics through the DARPA SubT challenge, delivering open-source benchmarking tools for SLAM evaluation. His later work explores machine learning applications in robotics, including decentralized dictionary learning and imitation learning for autonomous navigation. Collectively, his research reflects a career dedicated to making robot teams more capable, communicative, and deployable in demanding real-world scenarios.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Connectivity management in mobile robot teams

   168 citations · 2008
2. 2
   Multi-robot persistent surveillance planning as a Vehicle Routing Problem

   92 citations · 2011
3. 3
   Application of Multi-Robot Systems to Disaster-Relief Scenarios with Limited Communication

   80 citations · 2016
4. 4
   Visibility-based deployment of robot formations for communication maintenance

   47 citations · 2011
5. 5
   Test Your SLAM! The SubT-Tunnel dataset and metric for mapping

   46 citations · 2020
6. 6
   Control for Localization of Targets using Range-only Sensors

   41 citations · 2009
7. 7
   D4L: Decentralized Dynamic Discriminative Dictionary Learning

   22 citations · 2017
8. 8
   Improving Autonomous Robotic Navigation Using Imitation Learning

   21 citations · 2021
9. 9
   Hierarchical Planning for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Routing Problems via Learned Subteam Performance

   21 citations · 2022
10. 10
    The robotics bus: a local communications bus for robots

    20 citations · 2004

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links