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About

Lata Narayanan is a leading researcher in algorithmic robotics, with a focus on search and evacuation problems in uncertain environments. Her work tackles fundamental challenges in multi-robot coordination, fault tolerance, and communication constraints. She is best known for pioneering the study of autonomous robot evacuation from geometric spaces, such as disks, equilateral triangles, and squares, where robots must locate an unknown exit under time pressure. Her 2015 paper on wireless autonomous robot evacuation from triangles and squares has garnered 49 citations, while her work on evacuating robots from a disk using face-to-face communication has been cited 36 times. Narayanan has also made significant contributions to fault-tolerant search, including her highly cited 2016 paper "Search on a Line with Faulty Robots" (33 citations) and "Search on a Line by Byzantine Robots" (23 citations), which address the challenge of searching with unreliable robots. Her research on priority evacuation, where robots have different roles, has been published in multiple papers (2018-2020) with growing impact. Narayanan's work is notable for its rigorous theoretical analysis and practical relevance to robotics, disaster response, and autonomous systems.