The world's top 10 robotics science experts

1.) Prof. John J. Leonard - MIT

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Leonard is a renowned researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

2.) Prof. Dieter Fox - University of Washington

Dieter Fox is a German roboticist and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields including robotics, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning and Ubiquitous computing. Together with Wolfram Burgard and Sebastian Thrun he is a co-author of the book Probabilistic Robotics.

3.) Prof. Peter Corke - Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Peter Corke is an Australian roboticist known for his work on Visual Servoing, field robotics and the MATLAB Toolboxes for Robotics and Machine Vision. He is currently director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Robotic Vision , and a Professor of Robotics and Control at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). At QUT his research is concerned with robotic vision, flying robots and robots for agriculture. He was the founding editor of two most renowned journals in Robotics field - Journal of Field Robotics and the International Journal of Robotics Research.

4.) Prof. Juan D. Tardós - University of Zaragoza, Spain.

J.D. Tardós was born in Huesca, Spain, in 1961. He is professor with the Departamento de Informática e Ingeniería de Sistemas, University of Zaragoza, where he is in charge of courses in robotics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. His research group is doing pioneer work in robot vision, SLAM, perception and mobile robotics.

5.) Prof. Masayuki Inaba - JSK lab, University of Tokyo, Japan.

Masayuki Inaba is a Professor in the Information Science and Technology, Graduate School at the University of Tokyo. He leads the famous "JSK lab" in Univ. of Tokyo. His research interests include key technologies of robotic systems and software architectures to advance robotics research. His research projects have included hand-eye coordination in rope handling, vision-based robotic server system, remote-brained robot approach, whole-body behaviors in humanoids, robot sensor suit with electrically conductive fabric, flexible spined humanoid and developmental JSK mother projects with the remote-brained system environment. His students created the now famous SCHAFT robotics company which Google bought. They were the winners of pre-trials in the DRC 2015.

6.) Prof. Masatoshi Ishikawa - Ishikawa Watanabe lab, University of Tokyo.

Pioneering work in the field of sensor fusion, Computer vision, vision architecture and meta perception. Their work on robotic hands are exceptional.

7.) Dr. Sachin Chitta - Founder & CEO of a stealth robotics startup in the Bay Area, Formerly manager research at Willow Garage.

He was a core member of the team that developed the PR2 robot and the Robot Operating System (ROS). He initiated and led the development of the MoveIt!, Arm Navigation and ROS Control software platforms to enable advanced manipulation capabilities for any robot. This software is now used by hundreds of developers, researchers and companies around the world.

8.) Prof. Jun Ho Oh - Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, S. Korea

Prof. Jun Ho Oh created history by winning the Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015and taking home $US 2 million, by finishing all 8 tasks using the "Hubo" Humanoid robot that he created over several years. Prof. Jun Ho Oh is considered as a pioneer in the field of robotics and is the first few persons who are credited for starting robotics research in Korea namely at KAIST. His research interests are into humanoids, perception, control engineering and motion control.


The video below shows their winner robot during the DRC finals in 2015.

9.) David Scaramuzza - Professor of Robotics, University of Zurich

Davide Scaramuzza (1980, Italian) is Assistant Professor of Robotics at the University of Zurich. He is founder and director of the Robotics and Perception Group, where he does cutting-edge research on low-latency computer vision applied to the autonomous navigation of visually-guided ground and micro flying robots. He received his PhD (2008) in Robotics and Computer Vision at ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart). He was Postdoc at both ETH Zurich and the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis).

From 2009 to 2012, he led the European project SFLY (Swarm of Micro Flying Robots), which introduced the world's first autonomous navigation of micro quadrotors in GPS-denied environments using vision as the main sensor modality. For his research contributions, he was awarded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Early Career Award (2014), the ERC Starting Grant (2014, through the SNSF), a Google Research Award (2014), the European Young Researcher Award (2012), and the Robotdalen Scientific Award (2009). He is coauthor of the 2nd edition of the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots" (MIT Press). He is author of the first open-source Omnidirectional Camera Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB, which, besides accomplishing thousands of downloads worldwide, is also used at NASA, Philips, Bosch, and Daimler. He is also author of the 1-point RANSAC algorithm, an effective and computationally efficient reduction of the standard 5-point RANSAC for visual odometry, when vehicle motion is non-holonomic.

Finally, he is author of several top-ranked robotics and computer vision journals and Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Robotics. His research interests are field and service robotics, intelligent vehicles, and computer vision. Specifically, he investigates the use of cameras as the main sensors for robot navigation, mapping, exploration, reasoning, and interpretation. His interests encompass both ground and flying vehicles.

10.) Jitendra Malik- Professor of EECS, UC Berkeley

Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1980 and the PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

He is also on the faculty of the department of Bioengineering, and the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups.

During 2002-2004 he served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division and during 2004-2006 as the Department Chair of EECS.

He serves on the advisory board of Microsoft Research India, and on the Governing Body of IIIT Bangalore.

Prof. Malik's research group has worked on many different topics in computer vision, computational modeling of human vision, computer graphics and the analysis of biological images, resulting in more than 150 research papers and 30 PhD dissertations.

Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this research, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, and shape context. According to Google Scholar, ten of his papers have received more than a thousand citations each, and he is one of ISI's Highly Cited Researchers in Engineering.

Jitendra's group has worked on computer vision, computational modeling of biological vision, computer graphics and machine learning. Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this work, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging and shape contexts. He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Award for “A Contribution that has Stood the Test of Time” twice, in 2007 and 2008, received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award in computer vision in 2013 the K.S. Fu prize in 2014, and the IEEE PAMI Helmholtz prize for two different papers in 2015.

He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980 and a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989.

At UC Berkeley, he was selected for the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, a Miller Research Professorship in 2001, and appointed to be the Arthur J. Chick Professor in 2002.

He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2008.

He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize for a contribution that has stood the test of time twice, in 2007 and in 2008. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

In 2013 he received the PAMI-TC Distinguished Researcher Award.

Prof. Malik Doctoral descendants include: Lauren Barghout, Serge Belongie, Alexander Berg, Christoph Bregler, Charles Carson, Jr., Paul Debevec, Alexei Efros, Andras Ferencz, Charless Fowlkes, Ziv Gigus, Gregory Klein, Paul Kube, Thomas Leung, David Martin, Gregory Mori, Clark Olson, Pietro Perona, Xiaofeng Ren, Laura Renninger, Ruth Rosenholtz, Jianbo Shi, Joseph Weber, Yizhou Yu, Hao Zhang.