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About

Barbara Arbanas is a robotics researcher whose work centers on heterogeneous multi-robot systems, autonomous coordination, and real-world applications ranging from construction to environmental monitoring. Her research consistently tackles one of robotics' most challenging frontiers: enabling diverse teams of aerial and ground robots to collaborate intelligently on complex missions. Her most-cited work, "Decentralized Planning and Control for UAV–UGV Cooperative Teams" (2018, 108 citations), established foundational methods for coordinating unmanned aerial and ground vehicles without centralized control. This theme of aerial-ground cooperation runs throughout her portfolio, from early explorations of manipulator-equipped UAVs for autonomous delivery (2016, 49 citations) to sophisticated construction automation tasks achieved through cooperative robotic teams (2020, 98 citations). Arbanas has also made significant contributions to marine robotics, designing heterogeneous swarms for long-term underwater environmental monitoring (2019, 59 citations) and developing acoustic communication protocols tailored for submerged multi-agent systems. More recently, she has extended her expertise into autonomous indoor agriculture, proposing fully integrated robotic farming systems. Her distributed task allocation algorithms (2024) reflect an ongoing commitment to making multi-robot coordination scalable and practically deployable. Across more than 400 cumulative citations, her body of work demonstrates a rare breadth in applying rigorous coordination theory to societally meaningful, real-world robotic challenges.