Prof. Dr. Luca Carlone
I am the Leonardo Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Principal Investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information an 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).