We study multi-agent coordination and vision-based navigation for lightweight robot teams.

A research group at the University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology, led by Amanda Prorok.

FEATURED Apr 7 · ICRA 2026

Communication-constrained collective intelligence for indoor drone swarms

Bourached, Smith, Prorok

We study how teams of small quadrotors can maintain collective task performance when communication links become sparse, lossy, or actively jammed. Our approach learns a compact, task-relevant message protocol jointly with the control policy, and we evaluate it in indoor swarm experiments on the Argus platform.

pdf code video

FEATURED Nov 2025 · RA-L

On-board visual ego-motion for sub-100g quadrotors

Smith, Prorok

A lightweight visual-inertial odometry stack designed to run within the power and compute budget of a sub-100g indoor quadrotor.

pdf

FEATURED Oct 2025 · NeurIPS 2025

Heterogeneous multi-robot reinforcement learning

Bettini, Shankar, Prorok

We study cooperative multi-robot tasks where the team is composed of agents with structurally different sensors, actuators, and compute budgets. We introduce a centralised-training, decentralised-execution scheme that explicitly conditions on agent type, and show that it scales to teams of twelve heterogeneous robots with strictly better performance than role-blind baselines.

pdf code

Lab activity

Apr 4

VIDEO YouTube · 6:42

Argus platform walkthrough: building a 2.5" ducted research quadrotor

Split-compute architecture, WFB-ng link, CM5 integration — from frame to first flight.

Apr 2

TALK Invited · ETH Zürich

Amanda Prorok on multi-agent coordination under partial observability

RSS Robotics Seminar · slides · recording

Mar 30

POST LinkedIn

Two new Argus airframes came together this week. Parallel de

“Two new Argus airframes came together this week. Parallel development for swarm experiments starts next month.” read on linkedin →

Mar 28

HIRING Open until filled

PhD studentship: learned perception for aerial swarms

Fully funded PhD position starting October 2026, working on on-board visual perception for cooperating quadrotors. · apply

Mar 18

VIDEO YouTube · 3:11

Six-drone formation control under intermittent comms

Lab footage from the indoor flight arena, showing graceful degradation when the WFB-ng link drops below 5 Mbps.

Feb 14

POST LinkedIn

Three papers from the lab accepted at ICRA 2026 — congratula

“Three papers from the lab accepted at ICRA 2026 — congratulations to everyone who pushed through the rebuttal phase.” read on linkedin →