Papers
42
Total Citations
921
H-Index
15
About
Brian Coltin is a robotics researcher whose work spans autonomous mobile robots, localization, and multi-robot task planning. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to the CoBots project at Carnegie Mellon University, where a fleet of collaborative service robots autonomously navigated multi-floor office buildings across more than 1,000 kilometers — a landmark achievement in real-world robot deployment that earned his 2015 paper 150 citations. His research on the HTC Vive tracking system (148 citations) provided the robotics community with a rigorous accuracy assessment of an accessible, cost-effective pose estimation tool. Coltin has also made significant contributions to robot localization, developing methods for corrective gradient refinement in particle filters and illumination-robust visual localization for Astrobee, NASA's free-flying robot aboard the International Space Station. His task planning work addresses online pickup-and-delivery scheduling and hybrid wireless sensor network coordination, demonstrating a consistent focus on practical deployment challenges. More recently, his LunarNav research targets crater-based localization for long-range lunar rover navigation under NASA's Artemis program, reflecting an impressive trajectory from office hallways to the Moon.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1CoBots: robust symbiotic autonomous mobile service robots150 citations · 2015
- 2HTC Vive: Analysis and Accuracy Improvement148 citations · 2018
- 3CoBots: Collaborative robots servicing multi-floor buildings59 citations · 2012
- 4Mobile robot task allocation in hybrid wireless sensor networks58 citations · 2010
- 5Online pickup and delivery planning with transfers for mobile robots50 citations · 2014
- 6Corrective Gradient Refinement for mobile robot localization43 citations · 2011
- 7Robust visual localization in changing lighting conditions35 citations · 2017
- 8
- 9Localization from visual landmarks on a free-flying robot33 citations · 2016
- 10Dynamic user task scheduling for mobile robots31 citations · 2011