Marine Robotics Group
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
People
Principal Investigator
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
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
Caroline Keenan
Caroline Keenan is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and the MIT EECS department. She received her BS in Mathematics in 2020 and her MS in Applied Mathematics in 2021, both from RPI. Her research interests include sonar image processing, human-robot teaming, and explainable artificial intelligence. She works with the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
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.
Daniel Yang website
Daniel Yang is a PhD candidate in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT EECS department. He received his BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 2017 and his SM in EECS from MIT in 2023. His research focuses on computer vision and robotics in underwater environments, with an eye towards applications in coral reef monitoring. Specifically, his work focuses on developing 3D scene representations in these challenging visual environments with semantically useful information for monitoring biodiversity. He is co-advised by Yogi Girdhar and works with the WHOI Autonomous Robotics and Perception Laboratory (WARPLab).
Master's Students
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.
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 Cadena (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)
Ziqi Lu (Amazon Robotics)
Tim Magoun
Janille Maragh (Exponent)
Hunter McClelland (Researcher at Virginia Tech)
John McDonald (NUI Maynooth, Ireland)
David Moore (Dreamworks)
JP Morrsion (US Navy)
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)
Alan Papalia (Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan)
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)
Kurran Singh (Toyota Research Institute)
TJ Song (Candadian Navy)
Ted Steiner (Draper Lab)
Julian Straub (Research Scientist at Facebook)
Brent Tweddle (Argo AI)
Mark VanMiddlesworth
Ariel Vardi
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)
Yihao Zhang