John-Michael McNew

Papers

Total Citations

116

H-Index

About

John-Michael McNew is a pioneering researcher in cooperative robotics and multi-agent systems, with a core focus on developing formal, grammatical frameworks for the modeling and control of robotic swarms. His major contributions center on the introduction of **Embedded Graph Grammars (EGGs)**—a novel approach that unifies the discrete evolution of network topology with the continuous dynamics of robot states. This work addresses a fundamental challenge in cooperative control: how a robot team’s connectivity can adapt in response to its environment or mission goals. McNew’s seminal 2008 paper, *“Multi-robot deployment and coordination with Embedded Graph Grammars,”* has garnered 44 citations, while his earlier 2006 paper on *“Locally Interacting Hybrid Systems with Embedded Graph Grammars”* (35 citations) laid the theoretical groundwork. His 2007 paper on solving coverage problems using EGGs (32 citations) demonstrates practical applications in area exploration and sensor deployment. By providing a grammatical, rule-based language for specifying and verifying swarm behaviors, McNew’s work has influenced subsequent research in distributed robotics, hybrid systems, and formal methods. His contributions offer a powerful tool for designing predictable, scalable multi-robot systems, making him a key figure in the field of cooperative control.