Congratulations Marc Simmonds — M.S. Thesis Defense!
Congratulations to Marc Simmonds on the successful defense of his M.S. thesis, “Toward Safe and Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Drone Swarms”!
DRACO Lab member Marc Simmonds successfully defended his M.S. thesis on Wednesday, April 8, 2026. His committee was co-chaired by Dr. Mike Borowczak.
Marc’s thesis, “Toward Safe and Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Drone Swarms,” addresses multi-agent coordination under safety constraints. The work advances methods for autonomous drone teams to learn efficient cooperative behaviors while maintaining safety guarantees — a critical requirement for real-world deployment of multi-robot systems. Marc’s approach applies reinforcement learning with explicit safety-aware training, contributing to the DRACO Lab’s research in resilient autonomous architectures.
Marc’s defense was the third of three DRACO Lab M.S. thesis defenses held during the week of April 6–8, 2026.