Luca Carlone

Biography

Luca Carlone is an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS), and an Amazon Scholar.

As director of the MIT SPARK Lab, he leads work at the cutting edge of robotics and autonomous systems research. His goal is to enable human-level perception and world understanding on mobile robotics platforms (drones, self-driving vehicles, ground robots) operating in the real world. His work involves a combination of rigorous theory and practical implementations, including nonlinear estimation and probabilistic inference, numerical and distributed optimization, machine learning, and geometric computer vision applied to sensing, perception, and decision-making in single and multi-robot systems.

Specialization and Research Interests

My primary research interests include robotics, autonomous vehicles, computational perception, and Spatial AI. I am particularly interested in nonlinear estimation, numerical and distributed optimization, machine learning, and approximation algorithms, applied to sensing, perception, and decision-making in single and multi-robot systems.

Teaching Interests

Dynamical systems and control, sensing & estimation, optimization, autonomy, robotics

Academic Degrees

B.S., 2006, Polytechnic University of Turin, with highest honors; S.M., 2008, Polytechnic University of Turin, with highest honors; S.M., 2008, Polytechnic University of Milan, with highest honors; Ph.D., 2012, Polytechnic University of Turin

Society Memberships

Senior Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Associate Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

Positions Held at MIT

National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow; Raymond L. Bisplinghoff Faculty Fellow, 2024-2026; Boeing Career Development Associate Professor, July 2023-2025; Sloan research Fellow, 2023; Leonardo Career Development Assistant Professor, July 2020-2021; Charles Stark Draper Assistant Professor, 2017-2020; Research Scientist, 2016-2017; postdoctoral associate, 2015-2016

Positions Held outside MIT

Postdoctoral fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-2015; visiting scholar, University of California Santa Barbara, 2011; visiting scholar, University of Zaragoza (Spain), 2010

Awards & Honors

• National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, 2025
• Outstanding Systems Paper Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference, 2024
• IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award, 2023
• AIAA Aeronautics and Astronautics Advising Award, 2022
• Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021

Research

• Describe anything anywhere at any moment. In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2026) N. Gorlo, L. Schmid, and L. Carlone.
• VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM optimized on the SL(4) manifold. In Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2025) D. Maggio, H. Lim, and L. Carlone
• Certifiably optimal outlier-robust geometric perception: Semidefinite relaxations and scalable global optimization IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2022), H. Yang and L. Carlone
• Optimal Pose and Shape Estimation for Category-level 3D Object Perception Robotics: Science and Systems 2021 (2021), Jingnan Shi, Heng Yang, Luca Carlone
• Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception: From Non-Minimal Solvers to Global Outlier Rejection IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2020), Heng Yang, Pasquale Antonante, Vasileios Tzoumas, Luca Carlone