Agostino Martinelli

About

Agostino Martinelli is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans mobile robot localization, sensor calibration, multi-robot systems, and autonomous aerial vehicles. Based at INRIA, his research has fundamentally advanced how robots perceive, navigate, and cooperate in real-world environments. Martinelli's early contributions focused on improving the reliability of mobile robot navigation, including influential work on odometry error modeling for synchronous-drive systems and simultaneous localization and odometry self-calibration — enabling robots to correct motion errors on the fly. His comparative evaluations of line extraction algorithms using 2D laser rangefinders, collectively accumulating over 560 citations, became essential references for the indoor robotics community. His work on multi-robot cooperative localization demonstrated how teams of robots can share relative observations to achieve robust, distributed positioning — contributions cited over 440 times across two landmark papers. He further extended these ideas through observability analysis, clarifying the theoretical conditions under which cooperative localization succeeds. More recently, Martinelli has tackled autonomous micro aerial vehicles, contributing to GPS-denied navigation and mapping, as well as multi-robot 3D terrain coverage strategies. With over 1,800 cumulative citations, his body of work reflects sustained impact across both theoretical foundations and practical robotics applications, making him an indispensable reference for researchers in autonomous systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A comparison of line extraction algorithms using 2D laser rangefinder for indoor mobile robotics

   324 citations · 2005
2. 2
   Vision-Controlled Micro Flying Robots: From System Design to Autonomous Navigation and Mapping in GPS-Denied Environments

   297 citations · 2014
3. 3
   A comparison of line extraction algorithms using 2D range data for indoor mobile robotics

   243 citations · 2007
4. 4
   Distributed maximum a posteriori estimation for multi-robot cooperative localization

   226 citations · 2009
5. 5
   Multi-Robot Localization Using Relative Observations

   217 citations · 2006
6. 6
   The odometry error of a mobile robot with a synchronous drive system

   142 citations · 2002
7. 7
   Observability analysis for mobile robot localization

   125 citations · 2005
8. 8
   Simultaneous localization and odometry self calibration for mobile robot

   117 citations · 2006
9. 9
   Simultaneous localization and odometry calibration for mobile robot

   85 citations · 2004
10. 10
    Multi-robot three-dimensional coverage of unknown areas

    79 citations · 2012

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links