Tabatha

Viso

Hey! I’m Tabatha Viso (she/her), a robotics researcher, developer, and engineer. My focus areas are:

Swarm Intelligence & Collaborative Behavior

Multi-Objective Task Planning

Heterogeneous Robot Teams — land, air, & water

Human-in-the-Loop Automation

Developing for Real-World Implementation

Safety-Critical Solutions & Ethical Engineering

active research

Novel multi-agent UAV path planning algorithm for

urgent navigation in unknown environments

Research team: T. Viso, S. Tseng, M. Weissman

Mentor: C.-K. Ngan

Affiliation: Dept. of Robotics Engineering, WPI

Applied domain: Last-mile delivery

Objective: To develop a reliable and efficient swarm path planning algorithm for UAVs to navigate complex scenarios with varying swarm sizes and unknown environments of different sizes

Project context: Expanding on previous work studying three algorithms, we aim to develop one unified algorithm addressing all studied scenarios.

Key challenges: Enhancing computational efficiency and robustness, mitigating convergence risk to local minima

Anticipated completion: September 2024

Collaborative multi-objective task planning for

heterogenous multi-agent robot team

Research team: T. Viso, S. Tseng, M. Weissman

Mentor: C.-K. Ngan

Affiliation: Dept. of Robotics Engineering, WPI

Applied domain: Automated agriculture

Objective: To develop a coordinated system for a diverse group of robots to perform multiple agricultural tasks efficiently, addressing the need for enhanced productivity and resource management in farming

Key challenges: Optimizing task allocation for varying robot agent capabilities, enabling inter-agent collaboration and resource-sharing, managing computational efficiency and robustness

Anticipated completion: October 2024

selected work

Comparison & recommendation of state-of-the-art multi-agent UAV path planning algorithms for deliveries in unknown environments (2023-2024)

Multi-objective global task planning algorithm

using Pareto dominance for UAV swarm in urban fire

search & rescue application (2023)

Rail network & vehicle performance simulation modeling, analysis, & recommendations (since 2022)

Simulation & analysis of legged octopod & hexapod gaits on varying terrains on- & off-planet (2022)

Guidance, navigation, & controls for unmanned marine surface research vessel (2021)

Acoustic engineering modeling, analysis, & recommendations. AV design (2020-2021)

recent publication

“Swarm Intelligence Path-Planning Pipeline and Algorithms for UAVs”

Coauthors: T. Viso, S. Tseng, M. Weissman, W. Harris, C.-K. Ngan

Presented at: 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS), 2024

Published in: Proceedings of the 26th ICEIS Volume 1, pages 747-758, available here & here

Presented by: Tabatha Viso — April 29, 2024

Abstract: This research supports domain experts in selecting appropriate path planning algorithms for UAVs to address business problems, such as last-mile delivery. The study provides in-depth analysis and recommendations for three promising approaches: reinforcement learning-based, bio-inspired, and physics-based algorithms.

These methods are evaluated for solving the multi-agent UAV path planning problem.

Key Contributions:

• Developed a 2D UAV path planning simulation environment in Python
  
• Simulated three state-of-the-art optimization algorithms
  
• Conducted 450 simulations of 9 variations of swarm sizes and environment complexities
  
• Compared algorithm performance using classical A* Search as a baseline
  
• Provided informed recommendations for optimal use cases of each approach, considering environmental complexity and delivery urgency
  

education

life & leisure