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About

Jerry L. Trahan is a prominent computer scientist whose research centers on distributed computing, autonomous mobile robots, and swarm coordination algorithms. His most influential contributions focus on the "Complete Visibility" problem — a fundamental challenge in which N autonomous robots must reposition themselves on a plane so that every robot maintains an unobstructed line of sight to all others. Trahan's landmark work on robots with lights — a communication model using colored collars or lights operating under Look-Compute-Move cycles — has produced breakthrough results in algorithmic efficiency. His 2016 paper achieving Complete Visibility in O(1) time (41 citations) and its 2015 logarithmic-time predecessor (37 citations) established foundational benchmarks in the field. He has systematically extended these results to more challenging asynchronous settings, where robots operate without synchronized timing, demonstrating constant-time and O(log N)-time solutions under these harder conditions. Beyond visibility, Trahan has contributed to pattern formation and convex hull computation in distributed robot systems. With a body of work accumulating nearly 200 citations across his top papers, his research has meaningfully advanced theoretical understanding of how minimally equipped autonomous agents can collectively solve complex geometric coordination tasks — work of growing relevance to robotics, distributed systems, and multi-agent AI research.