Prof. Amanda Prorok

Biography

Prior to joining Cambridge, Amanda was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland. She has been honored by numerous research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, the EPSRC New Investigator Award, the Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and several Best Paper awards. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) prize for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL) and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO).

Research

Our research builds on this premise, and focuses on synthesizing decentralized agent controllers and interaction policies that lead to cooperative and collaborative systems. Many of our methods build on Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures, which provide a well-suited inductive bias for networked multi-agent teams and swarms. We are also interested in developing data-driven or hybrid approaches that find near-optimal solutions to hard coordination problems involving resource allocation, path finding, or graph optimization. Our solutions enable fast on-line decision-making, as typically required in robotics applications. As part of our work, we develop sim-to-real methods that facilitate the transfer of policies learned in simulation to real world systems.