P. Michael Furlong
Wyle (United States), Carnegie Mellon University, Ames Research Center, University of Waterloo
Papers
10
Total Citations
149
H-Index
7
About
P. Michael Furlong is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher whose work spans planetary exploration, autonomous systems, fault recovery, and neurobiologically inspired computing. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to planetary rover simulation, with his 2019 paper on lunar exploration mission simulation accumulating 62 citations — a foundational resource for researchers and mission planners seeking to develop driving intuition in extraterrestrial environments before costly deployment. Furlong has made significant strides in adaptive fault recovery for space robotics, developing reinforcement learning approaches that allow autonomous systems to intelligently select human assistants during failures, moving beyond rigid, manually specified lookup tables toward context-aware, data-driven policies. His work on multi-armed bandits for robotic state machine selection further demonstrates his interest in sample-efficient decision-making under expensive evaluation conditions. More recently, Furlong has ventured into neuromorphic computing, exploring spiking neural networks for SLAM and bioinspired active vision systems, reflecting a growing interest in brain-inspired approaches to robot perception and navigation. With publications spanning over a decade and collaborative work validated in operational space contexts, Furlong represents a researcher pushing the boundaries of intelligent, resilient robotics for real-world and off-world deployment.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Planetary Rover Simulation for Lunar Exploration Missions62 citations · 2019
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- 4Exploiting semantic information in a spiking neural SLAM system15 citations · 2023
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