Dr. Mac Schwager is an Associate Professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University. He earned his BS from Stanford in 2000, his MS from MIT in 2005, and his PhD from MIT in 2009. Dr. Schwager was a postdoc jointly at UPenn and MIT from 2009 to 2012, and was an assistant professor at Boston University from 2012 to 2015, before joining Stanford Aero-Astro in 2015. His research interests are in distributed algorithms for coordination, estimation, and learning in groups of robots and animals.

Dr. Schwager's lab, the Multi-robot Systems Lab (MSL), works at the intersection of control theory, optimization, machine learning, and computer vision to develop groups of robots that interact with one another and with humans intelligently, safely, and efficiently in real-world, unstructured environments. Their work will lead to swarms of autonomous drones that collaborate to map disaster sites and locate survivors; to autonomous cars that predict the actions of other drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists on the road, and take safe actions in response; and to fleets of manufacturing and construction robots that collaboratively assemble products and build structures from high-level specifications.