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About

Christopher Iliffe Sprague is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics, control theory, and autonomous systems, with a primary focus on behavior trees for robot control and cyber-physical systems for underwater vehicles. His seminal work, "Behavior Trees in Robot Control Systems" (52 citations), provides a foundational control-theoretic perspective on modular, hierarchical, and feedback-driven robot architectures—a contribution that has shaped modern approaches to versatile robot control. Sprague’s applied research addresses pressing challenges in marine robotics, including autonomous seaweed farm inspection with underwater robots (29 citations) and the development of hydrobatic AUVs—agile, efficient autonomous underwater vehicles for ocean production, environmental sensing, and security (25 citations). His innovative work on fully-probabilistic terrain modelling using stochastic variational Gaussian processes (15 citations) advances robot localization by incorporating map uncertainty into Bayes filtering algorithms. Sprague’s research demonstrates a rare ability to bridge rigorous theoretical foundations with real-world field demonstrations, making him a key figure in the growing field of autonomous marine systems and behavior-based robot control.