Luca Carlone

Luca Carlone is the Charles Stark Draper Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Principal Investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS). He received his PhD from the Polytechnic University of Turin in 2012. He joined LIDS as a postdoctoral associate (2015) and later as a Research Scientist (2016), after spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2013-2015).

His goal is to enable human-level perception and world understanding on mobile robotics platforms (micro aerial vehicles, self-driving cars, ground robots) operating in the real world. Towards this goal, his work involves a combination of rigorous theory and practical implementations. In particular, his research interests include nonlinear estimation and probabilistic inference, numerical and distributed optimization, and geometric vision applied to sensing, perception, and decision-making in single and multi-robot systems.

His work includes seminal results on certifiably-correct algorithms for localization and mapping, as well as approaches for visual-inertial navigation and distributed mapping. He is a recipient of the 2017 Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award, and the best paper award at WAFR 2016.