Colin McManus

About

Colin McManus is a leading roboticist whose research centers on long-term visual localization, autonomous navigation, and planetary exploration. His most influential work, "Shady dealings: Robust, long-term visual localisation using illumination invariance" (141 citations), pioneered techniques for outdoor stereo vision systems to maintain reliable feature correspondences despite dramatic changes in lighting and shadows—a critical challenge for real-world deployment. McManus further advanced visual navigation in "Into Darkness" (34 citations), developing a lidar-intensity-image pipeline that enables robots to operate in low-light or dark environments. He also introduced the concept of a Network of Reusable Paths (NRP), an extension of rapidly exploring random trees that allows mobile robots to autonomously navigate unmapped, GPS-denied terrain while accurately returning to previously visited points. This work, detailed in multiple papers (totaling 29+ citations), has direct applications to planetary rovers. McManus contributed to analogue lunar sample return missions, field-testing mission control architectures at the Sudbury impact structure. His serial approach to handling high-dimensional measurements in Sigma-Point Kalman Filters (8+ citations) improved computational efficiency for online pose estimation. Through these contributions, McManus has significantly advanced the robustness and autonomy of mobile robots operating in challenging, long-duration field environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Shady dealings: Robust, long-term visual localisation using illumination invariance

   141 citations · 2014
2. 2
   Into Darkness: Visual Navigation Based on a Lidar-Intensity-Image Pipeline

   34 citations · 2016
3. 3
   Learning place-dependant features for long-term vision-based localisation

   33 citations · 2015
4. 4
   A Mission Control Architecture for robotic lunar sample return as field tested in an analogue deployment to the sudbury impact structure

   16 citations · 2012
5. 5
   Planning using a Network of Reusable Paths: A Physical Embodiment of a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree

   16 citations · 2013
6. 6
   Exploiting Reusable Paths in Mobile Robotics: Benefits and Challenges for Long-term Autonomy

   9 citations · 2012
7. 7
   A Serial Approach to Handling High-Dimensional Measurements in the Sigma-Point Kalman Filter

   8 citations · 2011
8. 8
   A series of robotic and human analogue missions in support of lunar sample return

   4 citations · 2012
9. 9
   Planetary surface exploration using a network of reusable paths

   4 citations · 2012
10. 10
    A Serial Approach to Handling High-Dimensional Measurements in the Sigma-Point Kalman Filter

    4 citations · 2012

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links