Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

William Xie is a leading researcher in multi-robot systems, with a focus on distributed control, collective transport, and low-cost robotic manipulation. His work addresses fundamental challenges in enabling groups of homogeneous robots to work together autonomously to manipulate and transport objects. Xie’s most influential contribution is the development of four distributed motion controllers for collective transport, presented in his highly cited 2015 paper (60 citations), which allow a robot team to rotate, translate, and follow a guide robot without centralized coordination. He also made significant strides in system design for affordable multi-robot manipulation (47 citations), detailing robust hardware and sensing feedback that make scalable robotic teams practical. His 2016 work on distributed path planning (22 citations) further advances autonomous navigation for collective transport tasks. Xie’s research bridges theory and real-world application, offering scalable, decentralized solutions that are essential for future multi-robot systems in logistics, manufacturing, and exploration. His contributions are widely recognized for making multi-robot manipulation more accessible and efficient.