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GRASP Lab Seminar 2004-2005
September 24, 11:00 AM, Levine Hall 307.
John Leonard
Department of Ocean Engineering, MIT
Navigation and Mapping for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Abstract: The problem of simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) is stated as follows: starting from an initial position, a mobile robot travels through a sequence of positions and obtains a set of sensor measurements at each position. The goal is for the mobile robot to process the sensor data to compute an estimate of its position while concurrently building a map of the environment. The motivation for our work is to develop new SLAM algorithms for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). This talk will present results for several SLAM research topics including: (1) performing SLAM with noisy wide-beam sonar data, (2) methods for mapping large-scale environments, and (3) cooperative mapping by multiple vehicles. Joint work with Michael Bosse, Sung Joon Kim, Jose Neira, Paul Newman, Ed Olson, Richard Rikoski, Henrik Schmidt, Juan Domingo Tardos, and Seth Teller.
Biography: John J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Ocean Engineering at MIT and 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. 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 (formally 1994). He studied at Oxford under a Thouron Fellowship and Research Assistantship funded by the ESPRIT program of the European Community. Prof. Leonard joined the MIT faculty in 1996, after five years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Scientist in the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. He has participated in numerous field deployments of AUVs, including under-ice operations in the Arctic and several major experiments in the Mediterranean. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and recently completed a three-year term as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and an E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award from Science Foundation Ireland (2004).
