Zachary Madin

Zachary Madin

he/him

Robotics PhD researcher building distributed sensor fusion and state estimation for robotic systems. Bayesian inference in factor graphs applied to real robots. I also work on embedded software, open-source hardware projects and science communication in my spare time.

Open to opportunities in robotics, software, & autonomy.

Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Collective Ranking of Environmental Signals through Gaussian Belief Propagation in a Patrolling Robot Swarm

Accepted, to appear in DARS 2026 - Tokyo, Japan, 2026

Accepted, to appear: This paper presents a Gaussian Belief Propagation approach for collective ranking of environmental signals in a patrolling robot swarm.

Recommended citation: Madin, Z. R., Lawry, J., and Hunt, E. R. (2026). "Collective Ranking of Environmental Signals through Gaussian Belief Propagation in a Patrolling Robot Swarm" The 18th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS '26), Tokyo, Japan. (Accepted, to appear).

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Heterogeneity in Multi-Robot Environmental Monitoring for Resolving Time-Conflicting Tasks

Published in ACM/SIGAPP - Thessaloniki, Greece, 2026

Our findings demonstrate that pre-deployment role and sensing specialization are powerful design considerations for multi-robot systems facing time-conflicting tasks, where varying the degree of behavioral heterogeneity can tune system performance toward either task.

Recommended citation: C. York, Z. R. Madin, P. O’Dowd, and E. R. Hunt, ‘Heterogeneity in Multi-Robot Environmental Monitoring for Resolving Time-Conflicting Tasks’, 2025, arXiv. doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2512.08813.

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Co-movement and trust development in human-robot teams

Published in ICSR - Odense, Denmark, 2024

Qualitative interviews with participants confirmed that robot proximity was a decisive factor in which robot they preferred to call, and that a robot staying nearby over time made it “part of the team”.

Recommended citation: Webb, N., Milivojevic, S., Sobhani, M., Madin, Z. R., Ward, J. C., Yusuf, S., ... & Hunt, E. R. (2024, October). Co-movement and trust development in human-robot teams. In International Conference on Social Robotics (pp. 107-120). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

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Swift Trust in Mobile Ad Hoc Human-Robot Teams

Published in TAS - Austin, Texas, 2024

In designing robot systems with swift trust in mind, given the reliance on surface level cues such as robot appearance, it is also important to be aware of how different robot forms can influence expectations of capability.

Recommended citation: Sanja Milivojevic, Mehdi Sobhani, Nicola Webb, Zachary Madin, James Ward, Sagir Yusuf, Chris Baber, and Edmund R Hunt. 2024. Swift Trust in Mobile Ad Hoc Human-Robot Teams. In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686038.3686057

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Collective Anomaly Perception During Multi-Robot Patrol: Constrained Interactions Can Promote Accurate Consensus

Published in ACM/SIGAPP - Avila, Spain, 2024

We find that generally, MRP algorithms that promote physical mixing of robots, as measured by a higher connectivity of their emergent communication network, reach consensus more quickly.

Recommended citation: Madin, Zachary R and Lawry, Jonathan and Hunt, Edmund R, . (2024). "Collective Anomaly Perception During Multi-Robot Patrol." SAC 2024 1. 1(1).

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