Nora Ayanian
University of Southern California, Southern States University, Intel (United States), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Southern California University for Professional Studies, Creative Technologies (United States)
Papers
54
Total Citations
1,843
H-Index
20
About
Nora Ayanian is a pioneering roboticist whose research sits at the intersection of multi-agent systems, autonomous navigation, and human-robot interaction. Best known for her transformative contributions to multi-agent path finding (MAPF) and swarm robotics, Ayanian has fundamentally advanced how teams of robots plan, coordinate, and execute tasks in complex real-world environments. Her most influential work — "Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms" (308 citations) — introduced a landmark three-stage planning framework enabling drone swarms to navigate obstacle-rich warehouse settings with remarkable efficiency. This research, complemented by "Downwash-aware Trajectory Planning for Large Quadrotor Teams" (64 citations), demonstrates her sustained commitment to making aerial swarms practically deployable. Her extensive MAPF contributions, spanning kinematic constraints, lifelong planning, task assignment, and persistent warehouse execution, collectively represent a body of work that bridges theoretical AI planning with real-world robotic demands — garnering hundreds of citations across multiple publications. Ayanian also pioneered applications of mixed reality in robotics (157 citations), opening new pathways for seamless physical-virtual robot interaction. Her cooperative multi-robot target tracking research further illustrates her breadth across sensing, localization, and control. With a cumulative citation footprint exceeding 1,300, Ayanian stands as a leading voice shaping the future of intelligent, scalable multi-robot systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Trajectory Planning for Quadrotor Swarms308 citations · 2018
- 2Mixed reality for robotics157 citations · 2015
- 3Multi-Agent Path Finding with Kinematic Constraints139 citations · 2016
- 4Persistent and Robust Execution of MAPF Schedules in Warehouses129 citations · 2019
- 5
- 6Conflict-Based Search with Optimal Task Assignment91 citations · 2018
- 7
- 8Cooperative multi-robot control for target tracking with onboard sensing90 citations · 2015
- 9Downwash-aware trajectory planning for large quadrotor teams64 citations · 2017
- 10Flying Multiple UAVs Using ROS58 citations · 2017