John Leonard

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering; MIT Computer  Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanic

Spatial AI for Robots and Humans

The goal of Human-Centered Embodied Intelligence is to develop robots that can work safely alongside humans, helping them to perform difficult or dangerous tasks.  Two key themes are increasing the expressive capacity of the environmental models used in localization and mapping systems (representation) and improving the performance of the algorithms used to estimate these models from data (inference). Our ultimate goal is to provide autonomous robots with a more comprehensive understanding of the world, facilitating life-long learning in complex dynamic environments.  In this talk, we will discuss a variety of research projects spanning automated driving, object-based mapping and localization, and autonomous underwater vehicle navigation.  In particular, we will describe certifiably-correct range-aided SLAM (Papalia et al., IEEE TRO 2024), a new approach for range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping problems that computes certifiably optimal solutions.

John J. Leonard is Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering and Associate Department Head for Education 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 underwater vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and other types of 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 (1994). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014) and an AAAS Fellow (2020). Prof. Leonard is a Technical Advisor at Toyota Research Institute.