Joana Bou Barcelo
Joana Bou Barcelo is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida, working at the boundary between the GATAS Lab’s compositional methods and nonlinear control.
Her work applies cellular sheaves to coordination problems in multi-agent systems. In Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Multi-Target Tracking using Cellular Sheaves, written with Tyler Hanks, Cristian F. Nino, Austin Copeland, Warren Dixon, and James Fairbanks, the team poses the tracking of several unknown targets as a harmonic extension problem on a cellular sheaf. Because a sheaf can carry a different stalk over each agent, the formulation handles agents whose state spaces have different dimensions — the heterogeneity that makes these problems awkward to write down in the usual graph-Laplacian setting. The resulting decentralized controller is built from the sheaf Laplacian and comes with Lyapunov-based stability guarantees.
She presented this work as Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Multi-Target Tracking at the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference in Atlanta in March 2026.
Selected publications
- Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Multi-Target Tracking using Cellular Sheaves. Tyler Hanks, Cristian F. Nino, Joana Bou Barcelo, Austin Copeland, Warren Dixon, James Fairbanks. To appear, IEEE. arXiv:2512.24886