60% Research and Algorithm Development:
• Conduct research supporting autonomous multi-agent systems that must operate with incomplete observations, limited communication, constrained computing resources, and unreliable data.
• Develop and evaluate methods that help agents determine which observations to retain, how to update mission-relevant beliefs, what information to store, and when to share information with teammates.
• Adapt suitable estimation, control, machine-learning, and communication methods to the project’s multi-agent object-search scenarios.
• Implement these methods in a reproducible software framework and connect the information-processing components to a fixed downstream planner.
• Build and extend computational multi-agent object-search environments formulated as POMDP or Dec-POMDP problems, with noisy multimodal observations, intermittent communication, spoofed sensor inputs, corrupted messages, communication denial, and dynamic risk fields.
• Evaluate the resulting methods through numerical experiments, benchmark comparisons, and simulation studies in multi-agent POMDP environments, with emphasis on mission outcomes, belief quality, communication
and memory use, robustness, scalability, and decision latency.
• Review relevant research, software, and simulation tools as needed to support the project’s technical development.
35% Project Integration, Documentation, and Research Coordination:
• Integrate the project’s filtering, belief-estimation, memory, communication, and decision-interface components into a reproducible computational framework.
• Work with faculty, graduate students, and other project personnel to plan simulation studies, coordinate technical tasks, and support the development of the project’s computational demonstrator.
• Maintain simulation configurations, source-code repositories, software environments, model checkpoints,simulation logs, benchmark instances, and evaluation scripts needed for reproducibility.
• Prepare peer-reviewed manuscripts, technical documentation, presentations, benchmark releases, software releases, and monthly, quarterly, or annual project reports as required.
• Assist with project planning, milestone tracking, technical reporting, and the development of related research proposals.
• Collaborate with the project team to translate theoretical and computational ideas into a validated simulation-based demonstrator for multi-agent autonomy.
5% Perform other research-related duties as assigned.