Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Lillian Clark is a leading researcher in multi-robot autonomous exploration, with a focus on communication-constrained and extreme environments. Her work bridges robotics, networking, and artificial intelligence to enable coordinated exploration of subterranean spaces, Martian caves, and other GPS-denied, comms-restricted domains. Clark’s major contributions include developing communication-aware coordination frameworks—such as ACHORD, which optimizes multi-robot coverage under intermittent connectivity, and PropEM-L, which models radio propagation for better exploration planning. She also co-authored a comprehensive survey on autonomous subterranean exploration (64 citations) and led analog experiments for robotic cave exploration on Mars (18 citations). Her queue-stabilizing framework for networked multi-robot exploration (16 citations) and graph convolutional network-based scheduler for the Internet of Robotic Things (9 citations) further demonstrate her impact on distributed, real-time robotic systems. Clark’s work on extending the NeBula autonomy solution—the winning system from the DARPA Subterranean Challenge—underscores her contributions to field-deployable, resilient robotics. With over 165 citations across her top papers, Clark is shaping the future of autonomous exploration in the most challenging environments on Earth and beyond.