Papers
9
Total Citations
469
H-Index
7
About
James A. Preiss is a robotics researcher whose work spans multi-robot systems, trajectory planning, and autonomous navigation. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to quadrotor swarm coordination, most notably his 2018 paper "Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms," which has accumulated over 300 citations and established a widely adopted framework for navigating large robot teams through complex, obstacle-rich environments. His closely related work on downwash-aware trajectory planning addressed the aerodynamic interference inherent in dense quadrotor formations, demonstrating a practical two-stage planning pipeline that bridges discrete graph search with continuous trajectory refinement. Beyond swarm robotics, Preiss has made meaningful contributions to the intersection of trajectory optimization and state estimation, developing methods that simultaneously calibrate robot sensors while navigating — an elegant solution to a longstanding chicken-and-egg problem in mobile robotics. His more recent work reflects a broadening research vision, encompassing deformable object manipulation with learned dynamics models, resilient distributed multi-target tracking, and terrain-adaptive off-road vehicle control using visual foundation models. The development of QuadSwarm, a parallelizable reinforcement learning simulator, further highlights his commitment to building tools that accelerate the broader research community. Across these areas, Preiss combines rigorous mathematical formulation with practical system-level demonstrations, making his work valuable to both theorists and practitioners in autonomous robotics.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms308 citations · 2018
- 2Downwash-aware trajectory planning for large quadrotor teams64 citations · 2017
- 3Trajectory Optimization for Self-Calibration and Navigation30 citations · 2017
- 4Simultaneous self-calibration and navigation using trajectory optimization24 citations · 2018
- 5Resilient Multi-Robot Multi-Target Tracking14 citations · 2023
- 6Tracking Fast Trajectories with a Deformable Object using a Learned Model10 citations · 2022
- 7Downwash-Aware Trajectory Planning for Large Quadrotor Teams9 citations · 2017
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