Marine Robotics Group

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab

People

Principal Investigator

Photo of John J. Leonard

John J. Leonard

John J. Leonard is Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots and underwater vehicles. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994). He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014). Professor Leonard is also a Technical Advisor at Toyota Research Institute, where he has been working to improve vehicle safety using autonomous driving technologies.


Postdoctoral Scholars

Photo of Jungseok Hong

Jungseok Hong   website

Jungseok Hong is Postdoctroal Associate in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He focuses on addressing robotic perception problems to improve robotic autonomy in unstructured environments (e.g., underwater). Specifically, he is interested in enhancing semantic understanding of environments for robots using vision-based and multimodal sensor-based approaches. He received the degrees of B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sung Kyun Kwan University and South Dakota State University in 2015, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2017, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2023.


PhD Students

Photo of Ziqi Lu

Ziqi Lu   website

Ziqi Lu is a Ph.D. student from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2019 and his B.S. in Ocean Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017. His research interests lie in the areas of robot autonomy, machine learning, and computer vision. He is particularly interested in achieving long-term robustness in object-level simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

Photo of Alan Papalia

Alan Papalia   website

Alan Papalia is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT MechE Department. He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from UIUC in 2019. His research focuses on developing algorithmic foundations to enable low-cost collaborative robotics with a focus on enabling robotic systems which can support ongoing efforts in ocean and climate sciences. Specifically, he has largely focused on the development of certifiable estimation techniques for range-based localization and mapping, a sensor modality with major potential in marine, terrestrial, aerial, and space robotics.

Photo of Paige Pfenninger

Paige Pfenninger

Paige Pfenninger is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT EECS Department. She received her BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College in 2019. Her research focuses on acoustic array processing on AUV towed hydrophone arrays and moored hydrophone arrays. She is jointly advised by YT Lin at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Photo of Kurran Singh

Kurran Singh

Kurran Singh is a third year student in MechE. He received a BSc in Computer Science and Finance from Northeastern University in 2019. His current work focuses on active navigation for object-based underwater mapping.

Photo of Yihao Zhang

Yihao Zhang

Yihao Zhang is a Ph.D. student at MIT. He received his BS degree from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and SM degree from MIT both in Mechanical Engineering. His research interest is the mergence of deep learning and classical methods in applications of computer vision, SLAM, and thermodynamics. He is currently working on using SLAM to improve the object recognition and semantic segmentation performance of a deep neural network. He is also applying deep learning based computer vision techniques to automate the design of microstructures on a boiling surface.


Master's Students

Photo of Tim Magoun

Tim Magoun   website

Tim Magoun is an MEng student in the MIT EECS Department. He received his BS in EECS from MIT in 2022, and is interested in Visual-Inertial and Range-Only SLAM, and semantically-aided collaborative teaming for estimation and planning. In his spare time, Tim likes to work on hobby electronics and 3D printing.

Photo of JP Morrison

JP Morrison

JP Morrison is a MS student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT MechE Department. He recieved his BS in Naval Architecture from the US Naval Academy in 2018. His research interests include cooperative navigation of AUV and human-autonomy teaming.

Photo of Andrew Motz

Andrew Motz   website

Andrew is a Master’s student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. He recieved his BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2023. He is co-advised by Dr. Jeff Kaeli in the Oceanographic Systems Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Insititute. His research interests are AUV autonomy behaviors, obstacle avoidance, and situational awareness. Outside of school, he enjoys scuba diving, listening and playing music, and volunteering as an EMT.


UROP Students

Calvin Cigna

Calvin Cigna is a rising highschool senior at Thayer Acadamy in Braintree, MA. This summer they will be working on writing a package to visualize the non-convexity of SLAM optimization problems.

Photo of Wells Crosby

Wells Crosby

Wells Crosby is a 3rd year undergraduate student studying Computation and Cognition. His interests include simulation, graphics programming, and making music. He is especially interested in the possibility for groups of AUV’s to do ecological surveying.

Photo of Abigail Greenough

Abigail Greenough   website

Abigail Greenough is a rising high school senior at Thayer Academy in Braintree, MA. This summer she will be working on visualizing the non-convexity of SLAM optimization problems.


Alumni

Victor Amblard

Omoruyi Atekha (Stanford)

Alexander Bahr (Research Scientist at EPFL)

David Baxter (US Navy)

Andrew Bennett (MIT and MIT Sea Grant)

Mike Bosse (Zoox)

Cesar Cedena (University of Zaragoza)

Mei Yi Cheung

Kevin Doherty (Robotics Researcher at Boston Dynamics)

Tonio Terán Espinoza (Perception Software Engineer at Waymo)

Ryan Eustice (Assistant Professor at U of Michigan)

Maurice Fallon (Associate Professor at University of Oxford)

John Fenwick (Director at Apple)

Hans Jacob Feder (Managing Director at JP Morgan)

Ross Finman (Researcher at Niantic)

John Folkesson (Research Scientist at KTH)

Dehann Fourie (CEO at Navability)

Sophia Franklin (Cornell)

Luke Fletcher (Senior Manager at Toyota Research Institute)

Jiahui (Carol) Fu (Research Scientist at Boston Dynamics AI Institute)

Guoquan (Paul) Huang (Assistant Professor at University of Delaware)

Qiangqiang (Chad) Huang (Tesla)

Richard Heller (Sandia Labs)

Hordur Johannsson (Teledyne Gavia)

Michael Kaess (Associate Professor at CMU)

Been Kim (Research Scientist at Google Brain)

Violet Killy (Aerospace Corporation)

Sung Joon Kim (Bain and Co.)

Jacques Leedekerken (Oracle)

John Li (US Navy)

Janille Maragh (Exponent)

Hunter McClelland (Researcher at Virginia Tech)

John McDonald (NUI Maynooth, Ireland)

David Moore (Dreamworks)

Beipeng Mu (Momenta.ai)

Elias Muggler (KTH)

Paul Newman (Director of Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford)

Brendan O'Neill (US Navy)

Edwin Olson (Professor at University of Michigan)

Liam Paull (Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal)

Georgios Papadopoulos (Robotics Engineer at Facebook)

Lilly Papalia (General Motors)

Elizabeth Pedlow

Jesse Pelletier (US Navy)

Sudeep Pillai (Researcher at the Toyota Research Institute)

David Rosen (Northeastern University)

Antoni Rosinol (Co-Founder at Stack AI)

Brooks Reed (Cruise Automation)

Richard Rikoski

Mike Salvato (PhD Student at Stanford University)

Tim Setterfield (NASA JPL)

Ted Steiner (Draper Lab)

Julian Straub (Research Scientist at Facebook)

Brent Tweddle (Argo AI)

Mark VanMiddlesworth

Pedro Vaz Teixeira (Humatics)

Nicole Thumma (Pickle Robotics)

Christopher Wallsmith

Aisha Walcott (IBM Research Africa)

Matt Walter (Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)

Nick Wang

Peter KT Yu (CTO XYZ Robotics)