One day hundreds or thousands of data-gathering robots will rove the skies and the oceans autonomously, operating for weeks or months with little or no human supervision. Leonard’s Marine Robotics Group, part of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, develops navigation and mapping algorithms needed for such persistent autonomy. That includes software to help robots stay oriented relative to visible landmarks or create self-correcting real-time 3D maps of indoor and outdoor environments.

Prof. Leonard 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 joined the MIT faculty in 1996, after five years as a post-doctoral fellow and research scientist in the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. He was team leader for MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge team, which was one of eleven teams to qualify for the Urban Challenge final event and one of six teams to complete the race in 2007. In 2014 a team from Leonard’s group and Olin College won the Maritime RobotX Competition in Singapore, a competition to build a self-driving boat that could navigate a course testing motion planning and obstacle detection and avoidance capabilities.