Saurav Agarwal
Postdoctoral Researcher
GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania
Contact: SauravAg@seas.upenn.edu

Research Focus: Coordination and Motion Planning of Robots

Research Interests

My research focuses on developing large-scale decentralized and collaborative intelligent systems that enable robot teams to work cohesively through environmental perception, inter-robot communication of insights, and coordinated actions. By integrating learning-based methods, rigorous theoretical foundations, and practical field deployments, my aim is to introduce new capabilities, improve efficiency and resilience, ensure scalability, and optimize performance for complex tasks.
My Ph.D. thesis unifies coverage of point, curve, and area features in environments into a novel generalized coverage framework, formalized as optimization problems on graphs. We used the formalization to design approximation algorithms with provable guarantees and heuristic algorithms for fast large-scale applications, validating them extensively in simulations and experiments. Prior to the Ph.D., my research comprised analyzing and designing mechanisms and parallel robots using optimization techniques. My experience includes using symbolic algebra systems, developing open-source libraries, leading research projects, and mentoring students.

Recent Research

Coverage of Linear Features using Multiple Robots


Publications:

S. Agarwal and S. Akella, "Approximation Algorithms for the Single Robot Line Coverage Problem," Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics XIV (WAFR), Oulu, Finland, June 2021. PDF       bib

S. Agarwal and S. Akella, "Line coverage with multiple robots," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Paris, France, May 2020. PDF       bib     Video

Variable Formation

Development of algorithms to simultaneously compute the optimal assignments and formation parameters for a team of robots from a given initial formation to a variable goal formation.

Publication:
S. Agarwal and S. Akella, "Simultaneous optimization of assignments and goal formations for multiple robots," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Brisbane, Australia, May 2018.
PDF       bib     Video