Maurice Fallon.

University of Oxford.

Maurice Fallon is a Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford. His research is focused on probabilistic methods for localization and mapping. He has also made research contributions to state estimation for legged robots and is interested in dynamic motion planning and control. Of particular concern is developing methods which are robust in the most challenging situations by leveraging sensor fusion.

Dr. Fallon studied Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin and graduated in 2004. His PhD research in the field of acoustic source tracking was carried out in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge within the Signal Processing Group.

Immediately after his Ph.D., he moved to MIT. He worked as a post-doc and a research scientist in the Marine Robotics Group from 2008-2012. From 2012-2015 he was the perception lead of MIT's team in the DARPA Robotics Challenge - a multi-year competition developing technologies for semi-autonomous humanoid exploration and manipulation in disaster situations. The MIT DRC team competed in several phases of the international competition, finishing 7th.

From 2014, he was a Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer at University of Edinburgh. There he led research in collaboration with NASA's humanoid robotics program before moving to Oxford in April 2017.

Sponsored by:

Thomas Whelan.

Oculus Research / Facebook.

Dr. Thomas Whelan is currently a Research Scientist at Oculus Research in Redmond working with the Surreal Vision team. Previous to this he spent one year as a post doctoral research fellow at the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London, lead by Prof. Andrew J. Davison. He was previously a Ph.D. student at the National University of Ireland Maynooth under a 3 year post-graduate scholarship from the Irish Research Council. In 2012 he spent 3 months as a visiting researcher at Prof. John Leonard’s group in CSAIL, MIT funded by a Science Foundation Ireland Short-Term Travel Fellowship. He received his B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science & Software Engineering from the National University of Ireland Maynooth in 2011. His research focuses on developing methods for dense real-time perception and its applications in SLAM, AR and VR. He is the principal author of two widely used open source real-time dense SLAM systems, ElasticFusion and Kintinuous.

Sponsored by:

Stefan Leutenegger.

Imperial College London.