Matthew Walter
MIT CSAIL, Stata Center32 Vassar Street, 32-332 (map)
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
Tel: +1 (617) 253-7772
Fax: +1 (617) 253-4640
E-mail: mwalter "at" mit "dot" edu
Calendar
PGP public key
Research Bio
I am a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. I am working in collaboration with Seth Teller as well as Emilio Frazoli and Nick Roy, among others.
My current research concerns problems related to outdoor autonomous mobility and manipulation with a robotic ground vehicle. More specifically, I am interested in strategies for object manipulation that jointly account for object detection and manipulation in the presence of uncertainty. The platform, in this case, is a robotic outdoor lift truck tasked with moving objects around in a busy outdoor warehouse. The vehicle operates on rough terrain and must manipulate objects of a priori unknown geometry in the presence of people and other robotic and manually driven trucks. These factors pose interesting challenges with regards to navigation, perception, manipulation, and human-robot interaction.
Brief Bio
I received my PhD from the Joint Program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). My advisor was John Leonard.
My research considered the problem of robotic mapping and localization within unknown environments. I studied feature-based algorithms for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) whereby a robot builds a map of the world while concurrently estimating its position in the map. My thesis work focused on sparse Bayesian filters that track a probability distribution over the robot pose and map. A pdf copy of the thesis is available below.
Publications
Shkolnik, A., Walter. M., Tedrake, R., Reachability-Guided Sampling for Planning Under Differential Constraints. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 2859-2865, Kobe, Japan, May 2009.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Bahr, A., Walter. M.R., Leonard, J.J., Consistent Cooperative Localization. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 3415-3422, Kobe, Japan, May 2009.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Moore, D.C., Huang, A.S., Walter. M., Olson, E., Fletcher, L., Leonard, J., Teller, S., Simultaneous Local and Global State Estimation for Robotic Navigation. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 3794-3799, Kobe, Japan, May 2009.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Walter, M.R., Hover, F., and Leonard, J., SLAM for Ship Hull Inspection using Exactly Sparse Extended Information Filters. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 1463-1470, Pasadena, CA, May 2008.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Walter, M.R., Sparse Bayesian Information Filters for
Localization and Mapping, PhD Thesis, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, February 2008.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Walter, M.R., Eustice, R.M., and Leonard, J.J., Exactly Sparse Extended Information Filters for Feature-based SLAM. International Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 26, num. 4, pp. 335-359, April 2007.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Eustice, R.M., Singh, H., Leonard, J.J., and Walter, M.R., Visually Mapping the RMS Titanic: Conservative Covariance Estimates for SLAM Information Filters. International Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 25, num. 12, pp. 1223-1242, December 2006.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Walter, M., Eustice, R., and Leonard, J., 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, October 2005.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Eustice, R., Walter, M., and Leonard, J., Sparse Extended Information Filters: Insights into Sparsification. In
Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Edmonton, Alberta,
August 2005.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Eustice, R., Singh, H., Leonard, J., Walter, M., and Ballard, R.,
Visually Navigating the RMS Titanic with SLAM Information Filters. In
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS),
Cambridge, MA, June 2005.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Olson, E., Walter, M., and Leonard, J., Single-Cluster
Spectral Graph Partitioning for Robotics Applications. In
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS),
Cambridge, MA, June 2005.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Walter, M., and Leonard, J., An Experimental Investigation
of Cooperative SLAM. In Proceedings of 5th IFAC Symposium
on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, Lisbon, Portugal, July 2004.
[bibtex] [pdf]
Selected Talks
Presentation of "A Voice-Commandable Autonomous Forklift for Warehouse Operations in Semi-Structured Environments". Guest talk at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, July 2009.
[pdf (14MB), Details (including movies)]
Presentation of "SLAM for Ship Hull Inspection using Exactly Sparse Extended Information Filters" as part of the 2008 ICRA conference, Pasadena, 2008. (Note: presented by Franz Hover) [pdf (1MB)]
Presentation of "A Provably Consistent Method for Imposing Exact Sparsity in Feature-based SLAM Information Filters" as part of the 2005 ISRR conference, San Francisco, 2005. (Note: presented by John Leonard)
[pdf (16MB)]
Presentation of "Sparse Extended Information Filters: Insights into Sparsification" as part of the 2005 IROS conference, Edmonton, 2005. [pdf (17MB)]
Presentation on information filters for SLAM, MIT, 2004. [pdf]
Presentation on Sparse Extended Information Filters (SEIF), MIT, 2004. [pdf]
Personal
MIT competed in the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge and came in 4th place in their first year entering the competition. Their website offers some information on the team including pictures and movies of the car.
Websites of some friends/colleagues:Last Modified: August 19, 2009
