{"id":402,"date":"2024-10-18T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2024-10-18T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/?page_id=402"},"modified":"2024-10-23T09:33:49","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T13:33:49","slug":"john-leonard","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/john-leonard\/","title":{"rendered":"John Leonard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/learningautonomy\/files\/2024\/10\/Unknown-150x150.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"201\" height=\"201\" class=\"wp-image-403 alignleft\" \/><strong><span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #003366;\"><span>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/span><br \/>\nSamuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering; MIT Computer \u00a0Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)<br \/>\nMechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanic<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><span>Spatial AI for Robots a<\/span>nd Humans<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span>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.<\/span><span class=\"aas\">\u00a0 <\/span><span>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.<\/span><span class=\"aas\">\u00a0 <\/span><span>In this talk, we will discuss a variety of research projects spanning automated driving, object-based mapping and localization, and autonomous underwater vehicle navigation.<\/span><span class=\"aas\">\u00a0 <\/span><span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><strong>John J. Leonard<\/strong> is Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and <\/span><span>Ocean Engineering and Associate Department Head for Education in the <\/span><span>MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.<\/span><span class=\"aas\">\u00a0 <\/span><span>He is also a member of the <\/span><span>MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). <\/span><span>His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for <\/span><span>autonomous underwater vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and other types <\/span><span>of mobile robots.<\/span><span class=\"aas\">\u00a0 <\/span><span>He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical <\/span><span>Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and <\/span><span>D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford <\/span><span>(1994). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014) and an AAAS Fellow (2020). <\/span><span>Prof. Leonard is a Technical Advisor at Toyota Research Institute.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering; MIT Computer \u00a0Science 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18553,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18553"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningautonomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}