Category Archives: Maurice Fallon

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I am a Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. My research is focused on probabilistic methods for localization, tracking and mapping. In particular, I am the perception lead on MIT’s Darpa Robotics Challenge team – a multi-year multi-PI competition developing technologies for tele-automated humanoid robotic exploration and manipulation. I primarily work with Profs. Seth Teller and Russ Tedrake.

I previously worked with John Leonard in MIT’s Marine Robotics Group. My PhD was obtained from the Signal Processing Group of the University of Cambridge (advised by Simon Godsill).

If you’re interested in my research you can find more information here.

Recent News

  • December 2012: We’ve overviewed the last 4+ years of aquatic research in the Marine Robotics Group as part of the Springer textbook ‘Marine Robot Autonomy‘ edited by Mae Seto. Obviously, it makes a great Christmas present for all of the family!
  • September 2012: Our man-portable paper picked up some press attention. Some articles are summarised here.
  • August 2012: Our proposal for the DARPA Robotics Challenge has just been funded! I will be the perception lead on what will hopefully be an exciting 2 1/2 year project. Here’s our team’s webpage.
  • August 2012: Our IROS 2012 paper entitled “Sensor Fusion for Flexible Human-Portable Building-Scale Mapping” has been accepted and will appear at the conference in Portugal in October. More details on this page
  • June 2012: Check out Kintinuous – Spatially Extended KinectFusion. The color video is pretty impressive. Its work by our collegues at NUI Maynooth Tom Whelan and John McDonald. Tom is visiting the lab this summer.
  • June 2012: Tom and I gave an invited talk at PCL’s CVPR tutorial in Providence. Our slides are here.
  • May 2012: I gave an invited talk at PCL’s ICRA tutorial on Kinect Localization. My slides are here.
  • May 2012: Our ICRA Kinect Localization paper was nominated for best conference paper in St. Paul, Minnesota 2012 (5 of 2000 submissions). Thanks to Hordur and John for their contributions.
  • April 2012: Overview of the multi-year Feature Based AUV Navigation project has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Ocean Engineering
  • April 2012: High speed localization using only a Kinect at 5m/s. Yes that’s me running like a crazy thing!
  • Feb 2012: A journal paper of work from my PhD has just been published in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. You can now view it electronically now. It’s entitled “Acoustic Source Localisation and Tracking of a Time-Varying Number of Speakers”.
  • Sept 2011: We’ve had a great response about our work on 3D Kinect localization. Check out our videos. I’m looking forward to working with the folks at PCL on this at part of a code sprint sponsored by Toyota.
  • May 2011: My paper with Hordur, Michael and John was nominated for one of the best paper awards at ICRA 2011 – one of 20 nominees out of 2000 submission. The approach combined sonar and acoustic AUV navigation within a single smoothing framework. Read the paper here.

Background

I was a PhD student in the Signal Processing Group at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge. Simon Godsill was my supervisor with Andrew Blake as my industrial supervisor at Microsoft Research – who kindly funded my PhD studies. I completed my undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering (BEng) in University College Dublin (Ireland) in June 2004 where I worked with Scott Rickard.

Click here for some research results from my PhD.

Publications

 

My 3D Model – thanks to Kintinuous and PCL:

Original: