Daniel Marthaler
University of California, Los Angeles, Northrop Grumman (United States)
Papers
4
Total Citations
176
H-Index
4
About
Daniel Marthaler’s research lies at the intersection of cooperative control, swarm robotics, and variational path planning, with a focus on creating scalable, bio-inspired strategies for multi-agent systems. His most influential work, “Determining Environmental Boundaries: Asynchronous Communication and Physical Scales” (94 citations), pioneers methods for distributed agents to collectively sense and map environmental frontiers using limited, asynchronous communication—a foundational contribution to environmental monitoring with robot swarms. Marthaler further advanced cooperative control through his work on virtual attractive-repulsive potentials (VARP), demonstrated on Caltech’s Multi-Vehicle Wireless Testbed (46 citations), where he derived a motion planning map linking biological swarming models to second-order vehicle dynamics. In path planning, he introduced a novel variational approach using level set methods (27 and 9 citations), evolving entire paths via gradient flow to achieve locally optimal solutions—a departure from traditional point-based planners. His work bridges theoretical rigor with experimental validation, offering practical frameworks for search, exploration, and boundary detection in distributed robotics. Marthaler’s contributions remain highly cited for their elegance and applicability to autonomous systems operating under real-world constraints.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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