I am the Boeing Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Principal Investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS).
I am the director of the MIT SPARK Lab, where we work at the cutting edge of robotics and autonomous systems research. My goal is to enable human-level perception and world understanding on mobile robotics platforms (drones, self-driving vehicles, ground robots) operating in the real world. Towards this goal, my work involves a combination of rigorous theory and practical implementations. In particular, my research interests include nonlinear estimation and probabilistic inference, numerical and distributed optimization, and geometric computer vision applied to sensing, perception, and decision-making in single and multi-robot systems.
Human-level perception will increase reliability in safety-critical applications of robotics and autonomous vehicles (including self-driving cars and robots for disaster response), and increase efficiency and effectiveness in service robotics and consumer applications (manufacturing, healthcare, domestic robotics, augmented reality).
Learn more about the MIT SPARK Lab
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
I am committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in my research group, in my courses, within the AeroAstro department, at MIT, and within my research communities [inspired by Yisong Yue‘s website]:
- Diversity: I recognize that diversity, in all its shapes and forms, strengthens us both culturally and intellectually.
- Equity: I will fight for equal treatment of all people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other attributes that do not define a person’s academic and research potential.
- Inclusion: I will work to create an inclusive working environment so that everyone feels their voices are heard and their contributions are recognized.
Selected awards and recognitions:
- Research featured on Forbes, 2024.
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for the paper “Kimera- Multi: Robust, Distributed, Dense Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Systems” (in collaboration with Y. Tian, Y. Chang, F. Herrera Arias, C. Nieto-Granda, and J. How), 2023.
- Sloan Research Fellow, 2023.
- Best Paper Award Finalist for the paper “Uncertainty propagation for 3D reconstruction with deep dense monocular SLAM.” at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023.
- AIAA Associate Fellow, 2022.
- SPARK featured on MIT Spectrum, 2022.
- Listed among the top 2% most-cited authors across all scientific fields (paper) (2022 update).
- AIAA Aeronautics and Astronautics Advising Award, “in recognition and appreciation for outstanding commitment to undergraduate academic advising at Massachusetts Institute of Technology”, 2022.
- Best Student Paper Award, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021.
- Best Paper Award Finalist on Mobile Manipulation, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021.
- Best Paper Finalist, Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2021.
- Outstanding Reviewer at ICCV 2021.
- Outstanding Associate Editor Award at ICRA 2021.
- Outstanding Reviewer at CVPR 2021.
- 2020 Honorable Mention, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters for the paper “Graduated non-convexity for robust spatial perception: From non-minimal solvers to global outlier rejection“, 2021.
- NSF CAREER Award “Certifiable Perception for Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems“, 2021.
- Track Best Paper Award, IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2021.
- RSS Early Career Award, 2020.
- Best Paper Award in Robot Vision, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020.
- Vickie Kerrebrock Faculty Award, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.
- Amazon Research Award, 2020.
- Winner of the Urban Circuit Competition of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (as part of the CoStar team with JPL, Caltech, and KAIST), 2020.
- Best Student Paper Award, Symposium on VLSI Circuits, 2019.
- AIAA and IEEE Senior Member, 2019.
- Google Daydream University Research Award, 2018.
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award, 2018.
- complete list
For prospective students interested in SPARK:
- if you are an undergraduate student at MIT and you want to join SPARK: please consider taking 6.141 / 16.405 (Robotics: Science and Systems), 16.485 (Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles), or UROPing in the group.
- if you are outside MIT: please consider applying to the MIT graduate program. Due to the large volume of emails, I might not be able to reply to all emails from prospective students.
Other links:
- Robotics@MIT
- My Google scholar
- My Erdos number is 3 (Bandeira-Alon-Erdos)
- Download CV (updated: December 2022)
- Short bio (updated: December 2022)