John Leonard
Professor
Studies navigation and mapping for autonomous robots, including SLAM for underwater reconstruction and long-term object-based mapping.
John Leonard's lab at MIT works on robot perception & SLAM, autonomous vehicles & drones and embodied & active vision. 21 papers since 2023, 9 at top venues, mostly IROS and ICRA. 4 PhD students. 71 alumni, most often to Meta and Toyota Research Institute. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 5/ year
- at T1 venues
- 43%
- PhD students
- 4
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 71
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 1 papers2026 · T1 0 · collecting
- 7 papers2025 · T1 3
- 5 papers2024 · T1 2
- 8 papers2023 · T1 4
T1 venuesOtherVenues: IROS, ICRA, RA-L, CoRL, RSS
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Robot perception & SLAM8 papers
- long-term1 paper
- Autonomous vehicles & drones0 papers
- Embodied & active vision0 papers
- mapping0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
20261 paper
- Intl. J. of Robotics ResearchNeuSE: Neural SE(3)-Equivariant Embedding for Long-Term Object-Based SLAM
20257 papers
- RA-L3DGS-CD: 3D Gaussian Splatting-Based Change Detection for Physical Object Rearrangement
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaFrom Geoacoustic Inversion to Seabed Tomography Using a Distributed Network of Sources and Receivers
- ICRA (T1)Open-Set Semantic Uncertainty Aware Metric-Semantic Graph Matching
- ICRA (T1)SeaSplat: Representing Underwater Scenes with 3D Gaussian Splatting and a Physically Grounded Image Formation Model
- IROS (T1)Semantic Enhancement for Object SLAM with Heterogeneous Multimodal Large Language Model Agents
- RA-LShapeICP: Iterative Category-Level Object Pose and Shape Estimation from Depth
- —The Neverwhere Visual Parkour Benchmark Suite
20245 papers
- IEEE Trans. RoboticsCertifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaEstimation of the Spatial Variability of the New England Mud Patch Geoacoustic Properties Using a Distributed Array of Hydrophones and Deep Learning
- CoRL (T1)Learning Visual Parkour from Generated Images
- IROS (T1)Opti-Acoustic Semantic SLAM with Unknown Objects in Underwater Environments
- IEEE/OES Autonomous Underwater Vehicles SymposiumThe Spurdog AUV: A Field Configurable and Optionally A-Sized Low-Cost AUV
20238 papers
- OCEANS -LimerickA Comparative Analysis of Maneuvering Strategies for Cooperative Range-based Localization
- OCEANS -LimerickAttention-based Self-Supervised Hierarchical Semantic Segmentation for Underwater Imagery
- IROS (T1)GAPSLAM: Blending Gaussian Approximation and Particle Filters for Real-Time Non-Gaussian SLAM
- IROS (T1)NeRF-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular slam with neural radiance fields
- RSS (T1)NeuSE: Neural SE (3)-Equivariant Embedding for Consistent Spatial Understanding with Objects
- RA-LOptimizing fiducial marker placement for improved visual localization
- WACVProbabilistic volumetric fusion for dense monocular SLAM
- ICRA (T1)SCORE: A second-order conic initialization for range-aided SLAM
Where alumni went71 listed, 44% to industry
Industry 8Academia 10
Most often to
- Meta
- Toyota Research Institute
- Apple
Also to
- University of Michigan
- Boston Dynamics AI Institute
- Carnegie Mellon University
Apply to MITFall 2027
MIT EECS Computer Science PhD
- Round
- Single round
- Opens
- —
- GRE
- See program page
- English
- TOEFL/IELTS
- Fee
- USD 90
Confirmed on the program page.
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- Papers
- The lab homepage
- Members
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