Katia Sycara

Katia Sycara is the Edward Fredkin Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads influential research in multi-robot coordination, human-robot teaming, and autonomous agent systems. Her work explores how large-scale teams of robots—and hybrid teams of robots and humans—can collaborate effectively in dynamic, uncertain, and safety-critical environments. Sycara’s research combines insights from AI reasoning, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and human-centered design to develop algorithms that enable trustworthy, adaptive collaboration. She has made foundational contributions to swarm robotics, including methods that model human trust, influence swarm behavior, and ensure resilient operation in complex real-world settings. Her group studies theory of mind for agents, individualized adaptation in human-autonomy teams, scalable deep RL for multi-agent coordination, and distributed sensing strategies. Through extensive interdisciplinary collaborations, Sycara’s work has shaped applications ranging from disaster response and environmental exploration to defense, agriculture, and large-scale autonomous systems.