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About

Trey Smith is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans planetary exploration, space robotics, and autonomous navigation systems. His early contributions focused on enabling robust autonomy for Mars rovers, with foundational papers on traversability and obstacle avoidance (1999, 2002) accumulating over 300 citations and helping shape the trajectory of planetary surface exploration. Smith expanded this vision to multi-robot coordination, developing layered architectures and probabilistic planning frameworks that address the inherent uncertainties of robotic exploration in unknown environments. Perhaps his most visible ongoing contribution is the Astrobee project — a free-flying robot system for the International Space Station designed to assist astronauts with routine tasks in zero-gravity environments. His papers on Astrobee (2015, 2018) reflect a sustained commitment to translating research into operational spaceflight hardware. More recently, Smith has pushed the frontier of heterogeneous multi-robot collaboration, combining aerial and ground systems with semantic mapping and LiDAR-based localization to enable sophisticated teamwork without reliance on GPS. His work on HTC Vive accuracy (148 citations) also demonstrates a practical interest in accessible sensing tools. Across more than two decades, Smith's research has consistently bridged theoretical autonomy challenges with real-world deployment in some of the most demanding environments imaginable.