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.

Talks and presentations

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

October 27, 2026

Conference proceedings talk, The 18th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2026), Tokyo, Japan

This was my presentation of the paper accepted at DARS 2026, co-authored with Connor York, Jonathan Lawry and Edmund R. Hunt. The talk covered how the patrol graph that dictates where a robot swarm moves can also serve as a factor graph, allowing Gaussian Belief Propagation to form a collective ranking of all patrol locations by a measured signal. I compared this against simple and visit-weighted averaging in simulation, and showed hardware trials with four Leo Rovers tracking a radio signal in an office lobby. The paper is available here.

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Repair cafés: Fighting Against Planned Obsolescence and the Hall of Fame/Infamy

March 10, 2026

Dorkbot Science communication, Watershed, Bristol, UK

This was my first Dorkbot presentation I’d ever given, and I spoke about the work that I do at the Sparks Repair Café, why it’s important and why I volunteer there. I went through a brief history of repair cafés and why we do what we do, and then I did a showcase of some of the hall of fame items we’ve had in the repair cafe!

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

April 09, 2024

Conference proceedings talk, The 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing, Avila, Spain

This was my presentation to present the paper that I had accepted in the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, which is a large conference with around 1000 attendees. The paper was on the topic of multi-robot patrol and how to detect anomalies in the environment that the robots are patrolling. The paper was accepted in the Robotics (IRMAS) track of the conference, and I presented it in a session with other robotics papers. The paper is available here

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