My doctoral studies are concerned with the design of fault-tolerant protocols for sensor placement and coverage repair in Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks (WSRNs), an emergent research area stemming from the integration between wireless sensor networks and multi-robot systems.

The ability of mobile robots nowadays to carry a limited number of sensors as payload can be actively exploited for providing reliable network coverage around a point of interest (Focused Coverage) by making use of low-cost inter-robot and robot-sensor coordination schemes.

A large part of my research is devoted to address the real-world problem of Carrier-based Coverage Repair, in which one or more robots are responsible for replacing damaged sensors previously deployed in the field with spare, passive ones, in an attempt to preserve the monitoring strength of the sensor network. The main problem and its particular variations all fall under the umbrella of combinatorial optimization, which ignites the application of Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, particularly hybrid nature-inspired optimization algorithms and cooperative search strategies.

I am always eager to engage in a fruitful collaboration with industry partners which feel the type of research being conducted is relevant to their needs.

Other Computational Intelligence areas that I have also worked on: knowledge-based clustering, neural networks, rough sets, fuzzy systems and case-based reasoning.

You may want to download the poster "Artificial Ant Colonies for Coverage Repair in Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks" to gain a better understanding of my current research topic.