Sasanka Nagavalli
Papers
13
Total Citations
169
H-Index
7
About
Sasanka Nagavalli is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-swarm interaction, multi-robot coordination, and autonomous systems. With over 160 citations across her published work, she has established herself as a meaningful contributor to the emerging field of robotic swarm supervision and control. Her most influential contributions center on the concept of "neglect benevolence" — a framework quantifying how robotic swarms perform when human operators are intermittently inattentive or delayed in providing input. Her 2015 paper on bounds of neglect benevolence (44 citations) and its 2014 predecessor (26 citations) form a foundational body of work addressing the practical realities of human-supervised autonomous systems. Complementing this, her research on automated behavior sequencing and time-optimal scheduling explores how swarms can intelligently transition between goals with minimal operator burden. Nagavalli has also tackled critical infrastructure challenges in multi-robot systems, including distributed leader selection under bandwidth constraints, coordinate frame alignment, and connectivity-preserving navigation in cluttered environments. Her work on wearable gesture interfaces for swarm control reflects a commitment to making human-robot interaction more intuitive. Notably, she has also investigated security vulnerabilities in swarm systems, examining how adversarial agents might exploit the very properties — homogeneity and anonymity — that make swarms resilient.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Neglect Benevolence in human control of robotic swarms26 citations · 2014
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- 5Asynchronous distributed information leader selection in robotic swarms9 citations · 2015
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- 8Multi-Operator Gesture Control of Robotic Swarms Using Wearable Devices7 citations · 2017
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