Al Abri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He works under the supervision of ECE Professor Fumin Zhang at the Georgia Tech Systems Research (GTSR) Lab. The award is in recognition of high-quality research, professional poster, and outstanding presentation.

Al Abri received the award for the poster entitled “A Multi-Layer Swarm Control Model for Information Propagation and Multi-Tasking.” The poster presents a multi-layer control model composed of an interplay of decentralized algorithms for perception and swarming. This novel model is used to demonstrate implicit information propagation and multi-tasking in swarms using only local interactions and without explicit communication or prescribed formations. The proposed model has the potential to be used to design various swarm algorithms – especially those incorporating individual differences between agents – such as designing tactics for a swarm of drones to avoid or chase a malicious agent.

The research is part of a project supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and by Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). In this project, Al Abri and his colleagues at the GTSR Lab focus on translating the biologically feasible system's behaviors obtained from both experimental observations and theoretical analysis into biologically inspired autonomy solutions to engineering systems. They experimentally validate their solutions using a swarm of the Georgia Tech Miniature Autonomous Blimps (GTMAB). GTMAB is an indoor platform developed by the GTSR lab to test various algorithms for swarming and human to robot interactions in a three-dimensional environment.