Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Mary Koes is a pioneering researcher in multirobot coordination and human-robot teaming, with a primary focus on Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) robotics. Her foundational work, "Human-Robot Teaming for Search and Rescue" (282 citations), established a groundbreaking architecture for integrating humans and robots in disaster response, introducing a sensor fusion algorithm for robust victim detection that aggregates data from multiple robots. This work, combined with her validation of USARsim for Human-Robot Interaction research (76 citations), created essential simulation tools that enable safe, repeatable testing of rescue robots. Koes made significant theoretical contributions by formally defining the problem of scheduling heterogeneous robot teams under spatial and temporal constraints (73 citations), providing the field with much-needed formal problem descriptions and benchmarks. Her constraint optimization coordination architecture (49 citations) directly addresses the time-sensitive nature of disaster response, while her innovative concept of "fractured subteams" (11 citations) models communication breakdowns in uncertain environments, offering a hybrid distributed coordination approach. Koes’s work bridges the critical gap between theoretical coordination algorithms and practical deployment in life-saving scenarios, establishing her as a key figure in advancing robotic disaster response capabilities.