John J. Leonard

Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering

Room 5-214
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge MA 02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-5305
Email: jleonard@mit.edu

Administrative Contact:
Marcia Munger
Room 5-207
Phone: 617-253-9709
Email: mlmunger@mit.edu

Teaching Interests
Recent teaching has included co-teaching of the subjects 2.671 Instrumentation and Measurement 2.12 Introduction to Robotics. I will offer a new graduate subject, 2.166 Probabilistic Robotics, in Fall, 2007.

Educational Background
BSEE summa cum laude, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1987

Principal Publications (last 5 years)
1. E. Olson, J. Leonard, S. Teller. Fast Iterative Alignment of Pose Graphs with Poor Initial Estimates. In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2006.
2. M. Benjamin, J. Curcio, J. Leonard, P. Newman. Navigation of Unmanned Marine Vehicles in Accordance with the Rules of the Road. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2006.
3. M. Walter, R. Eustice, and J. Leonard, A Provably Consistent Method for Imposing Exact Sparsity in Feature-based SLAM Information Filters, In Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), San Francisco, CA, USA, October 2005.
4. R. Eustice, M. Walter, and J. Leonard, Sparse Extended Information Filters: Insights into Sparsification, In Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, August 2005.
5. R. Eustice, H. Singh, J. Leonard, M. Walter, and R. Ballard, Visually Navigating the RMS Titanic with SLAM Information Filters, In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Cambridge, MA, USA, June 2005.

Scientific and Professional Societies
1996-present-IEEE (Oceanic Engineering and Robotics and Automation Societies)
2000-2003-IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Associate Editor

Honors and Awards
1987-Thouron Fellowship
1986-Henry L. And Grace Doherty Assistant Professorship in Ocean Utilization
1998-National Science Foundation CAREER Award
2004-E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award, Science Foundation Ireland
2004-Best Paper Award, ACM SenSys, (with D. Moore, D. Rus, and S. Teller)
2005-Best Student Paper Award, IEEE ICRA 2005, (awarded to Ryan Eustice, MIT/WHOI joint program, co-advised with Hanumant Singh)