Sarah Tang

About

Dr. Sarah Tang is a leading roboticist whose research lies at the intersection of aerial robotics, multi-robot systems, and autonomous navigation. Her most impactful work addresses the fundamental challenge of enabling agile, safe, and coordinated flight for quadrotors and robot teams in complex, unstructured environments. Dr. Tang’s seminal 2018 paper on aggressive flight with suspended payloads (135 citations) pioneered vision-based control for dynamic payload manipulation, allowing aerial robots to execute energy-optimal maneuvers with deliberate load swings. She further advanced high-speed autonomous navigation with her 2016 work on dual-range planning for quadrotors with limited onboard sensing (103 citations), enabling safe flight through unknown spaces. Her contributions to multi-robot coordination are equally significant, including the HOOP algorithm for centralized trajectory generation (64 citations) and complete algorithms for safe multi-robot planning with higher-order dynamics. Dr. Tang has also explored planetary exploration, mapping caves with heterogeneous robot teams (28 citations), and applied reinforcement learning to unlabeled multi-robot planning. With over 440 total citations, her work has profoundly influenced aerial manipulation, autonomous navigation, and multi-robot coordination, establishing her as a key innovator in field robotics.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Aggressive Flight With Suspended Payloads Using Vision-Based Control

   135 citations · 2018
2. 2
   High speed navigation for quadrotors with limited onboard sensing

   103 citations · 2016
3. 3
   Hold Or take Optimal Plan (HOOP): A quadratic programming approach to multi-robot trajectory generation

   64 citations · 2017
4. 4
   Safe and complete trajectory generation for robot teams with higher-order dynamics

   29 citations · 2016
5. 5
   A Complete Algorithm for Generating Safe Trajectories for Multi-robot Teams

   29 citations · 2017
6. 6
   Mapping planetary caves with an autonomous, heterogeneous robot team

   28 citations · 2013
7. 7
   Multi-Robot Control for Circumnavigation of Particle Distributions

   20 citations · 2014
8. 8
   Multi-robot Trajectory Generation for an Aerial Payload Transport System

   17 citations · 2019
9. 9
   Learning Safe Unlabeled Multi-Robot Planning with Motion Constraints

   13 citations · 2019
10. 10
    Safe Navigation of Quadrotor Teams to Labeled Goals in Limited Workspaces

    4 citations · 2017

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links