Papers
44
Total Citations
2,153
H-Index
22
About
Edwin Olson is a leading roboticist whose work has fundamentally shaped autonomous navigation, multi-robot systems, and robust state estimation. His key contributions span scan matching, mapping, and communication infrastructure. He developed real-time correlative scan matching, a highly influential algorithm that enables robots to accurately register laser scans for localization and mapping, with his seminal 2009 paper garnering over 358 citations. Olson also created the Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM) library, a low-latency message-passing system now widely used in real-time robotics, cited over 300 times. His research on robust mapping introduced novel inference techniques that prevent catastrophic failures from erroneous loop closures, a critical advance for reliable autonomous operation. Olson led MIT’s team in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where his vehicle Talos competed in one of the first autonomous car races; his post-race analysis of a collision with Cornell’s robot became a classic case study in autonomous vehicle safety. With over 1,400 total citations, his work continues to influence modern robotics, from self-driving cars to multi-robot reconnaissance systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Real-time correlative scan matching358 citations · 2009
- 2LCM: Lightweight Communications and Marshalling301 citations · 2010
- 3Inference on networks of mixtures for robust robot mapping246 citations · 2013
- 4Robust and efficient robotic mapping109 citations · 2008
- 5Progress toward multi‐robot reconnaissance and the MAGIC 2010 competition85 citations · 2012
- 6M3RSM: Many-to-many multi-resolution scan matching79 citations · 2015
- 7The MIT–Cornell collision and why it happened76 citations · 2008
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- 10A High-rate, Heterogeneous Data Set From The DARPA Urban Challenge68 citations · 2010