Computer Science student Ross Mead presented his research "Algorithms for Control and Interaction of Large Formations of Robots," which was motivated by a joint workshop between NASA and the NSF for harvesting solar power in space. His research involves the use of mobile robots to form a solar reflector. Meads research treats these robots as a lattice of computational elements, or cells. Due to the artificially intelligent nature of these cells, Meads paper was accepted for presentation at the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) in Boston, Massachusetts, which was sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Mead will be continuing his research this Fall and next Spring, creating a graphical human-robot interface to provide a visualization of the formation and status information of each individual robot unit, as well as implementing and testing on a modest number of physical robots, proving that the approach is viable in real space. He hopes to demonstrate results at AAAI-07 next year in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.