Michael Watterson

About

Michael Watterson is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of autonomous flight, trajectory optimization, and geometric control for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Best known for his contributions to quadrotor navigation, Watterson has fundamentally advanced how aerial robots plan and execute safe, high-speed flight in complex, GPS-denied environments. His 2017 paper on planning dynamically feasible trajectories using safe flight corridors — now cited over 537 times — established a landmark framework for convex optimization-based trajectory generation that remains widely influential in the field. Complementing this, his research on fast autonomous flight in cluttered environments (196 citations) and high-speed navigation with limited onboard sensing (103 citations) demonstrated that quadrotors could operate reliably and rapidly without relying on external infrastructure or rich sensor suites. Watterson also pushed boundaries in the mathematical foundations of robotics, applying differential geometry and Riemannian manifold theory to trajectory optimization problems on spaces such as SE(3) and SO(3), enabling more principled motion planning for complex robotic systems including free-flying space robots. His body of work collectively bridges rigorous mathematical theory with real-world autonomous systems, making him a significant contributor to modern aerial robotics.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Planning Dynamically Feasible Trajectories for Quadrotors Using Safe Flight Corridors in 3-D Complex Environments

   537 citations · 2017
2. 2
   Fast, autonomous flight in GPS‐denied and cluttered environments

   196 citations · 2017
3. 3
   High speed navigation for quadrotors with limited onboard sensing

   103 citations · 2016
4. 4
   Visual inertial odometry for quadrotors on SE(3)

   57 citations · 2016
5. 5
   Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadrotor Flight

   54 citations · 2018
6. 6
   Safe receding horizon control for aggressive MAV flight with limited range sensing

   45 citations · 2015
7. 7
   Trajectory optimization on manifolds with applications to quadrotor systems

   34 citations · 2020
8. 8
   Trajectory Optimization On Manifolds with Applications to SO(3) and R3XS2

   19 citations · 2018
9. 9
   Smooth trajectory generation on SE(3) for a free flying space robot

   13 citations · 2016
10. 10
    Geometric Control and Trajectory Optimization for Bidirectional Thrust Quadrotors

    5 citations · 2020

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links