The Autonomous Intelligence and Robotics (AIRob) Lab

My interests are mainly in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. Specifically, I am interested in topics on automated planning, multi-agent/robot systems, spatio-temporal and constraint reasoning, and applications of probabilistic methods and other topics related to graphs, combinatorial optimization, and algorithms.

About Dr. Hang Ma

Short Bio to be added.

Research

Teams of agents often have to constantly assign tasks among themselves and then plan collision-free paths to the task locations. For example, together with researchers from NASA's Ames research center, I envision a future in which autonomous aircraft towing vehicles tow aircraft all the way from the runways to their gates (and vice versa), thereby reducing pollution, energy consumption, congestion, and human workload. With support from Amazon Robotics and Alibaba, I tackle computational problems arising in challenging scenarios in which hundreds of robots navigate autonomously in warehouses to move inventory pods all the way from their storage locations to the inventory stations that need the products they store (and vice versa).
The coordination problems for these agents are NP-hard in general, yet one must assign tasks and find high-quality collision-free paths for them in real-time. I therefore study different versions of task-assignment (TA) and multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems, their complexities, algorithms for solving them, and their applications. My work unifies tools and techniques from the artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, and theoretical computer science communities to establish an algorithmic foundation for making fast and good decisions to coordinate the long-term task- and path-planning operations for real-world multi-agent systems at a scale of hundreds of agents and thousands of tasks.

Prospective Students

I am always looking for self-motivated students at all levels. See my research highlights here. If you are interested in working with me on AI, robotics, and multi-agent/robot systems, please mention my name in your application to the SFU CS graduate program. Applicants should also refer to the SFU CS graduate program page for more information on the admission requirements and application deadlines. More information can be found at the lab website here.