Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Ryan Soussan is a robotics researcher specializing in autonomous navigation, localization, and perception systems for space robotics applications. His work is centered on enabling free-flying robots to operate reliably in the challenging microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS), with a particular focus on visual-inertial odometry, semantic mapping, and change detection. Soussan's most recognized contribution is AstroLoc (2022, 12 citations), a monocular visual-inertial graph-based localization system designed for NASA's Astrobee robots aboard the ISS. By addressing the computational limitations inherent to graph-based methods, AstroLoc delivers efficient and robust real-time localization in a uniquely constrained environment. Complementing this, his work on semantic mapping and localization (2022, 7 citations) introduces object-detection-based approaches that provide absolute localization without relying solely on geometric point-feature maps — a meaningful step forward for trajectory-following and human-robot collaboration in space. His 2024 benchmark dataset paper (9 citations) offers the first annotated evaluation suite for free-flyer navigation algorithms, providing the research community with a critical resource for developing and validating space intra-vehicular systems. His ongoing work on AstroبeeCD further extends these capabilities into environmental change detection, underscoring his commitment to advancing autonomous situational awareness in microgravity.