Yawei Zhang

Papers

Total Citations

115

H-Index

About

Yawei Zhang is a leading researcher in multi-robot systems, with a primary focus on autonomous aerial vehicle coordination and exploration under real-world constraints. Their most influential work, "Multi-UAV exploration with limited communication and battery" (2015, 115 citations), tackles a critical challenge in field robotics: enabling teams of drones to efficiently map unknown environments despite unreliable communication links and finite battery life. Zhang’s key contribution is an adaptive coordination algorithm that allows heterogeneous robot behaviors, dynamically balancing exploration coverage with energy conservation. This work has become foundational for researchers designing resilient, decentralized multi-agent systems for search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and disaster response. By addressing the practical limitations of communication dropouts and power constraints—often overlooked in idealized simulations—Zhang’s research bridges the gap between theoretical multi-robot planning and real-world deployment. Their findings have been widely adopted in subsequent studies on UAV swarm coordination, earning recognition for advancing robust, scalable exploration strategies. Zhang’s work continues to inspire new approaches to autonomous teamwork in communication-denied environments.