Kevin Doherty
I'm a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the AeroAstro department, as part of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program.
I am a member of the Marine Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where I'm advised by John Leonard.
My research lies at the intersection of machine learning and autonomous robotic navigation. I'm particularly interested in two sorts of problems: achieving robust machine learning on robotic systems to the benefit of navigation tasks, and applying constraints imposed by the physical environment to aid in learning on robots. My research is funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Previously I worked on distributed learning algorithms for underwater exploration with application to biological surveying tasks. Before that, I was an undergraduate student at Stevens Institute of Technology where I did research on robot mapping in the Robust Field Autonomy Lab under Brendan Englot.
Latest News
- Our review paper on advances in inference and representations for SLAM is now available from Annual Reviews (also available on arXiv here).
- Our new paper on copula models for non-Gaussian SLAM was accepted to IROS 2020
- Our new paper on robust semantic SLAM was accepted to ICRA 2020
Recent Publications
- D. M. Rosen, K. J. Doherty, A. Teran Espinoza, and J. J. Leonard, "Advances in Inference and Representation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping", Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Vol. 4. May, 2021. < arxiv >
- J. Martin*, K. Doherty*, C. Cyr, B. Englot, J. Leonard, "Variational Filtering with Copula Models for SLAM", IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2020. Accepted. < arxiv >
- K. Doherty, D. Baxter*, E. Schneeweiss*, J. Leonard, "Probabilistic Data Association via Mixture Models for Robust Semantic SLAM", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020. < arxiv, video >
- K. Doherty, D. Fourie, and J. Leonard, "Multimodal Semantic SLAM with Probabilistic Data Association", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). May 2019. < pdf, video >
- T. Shan, K. Doherty, J. Wang, and B. Englot, "Bayesian Generalized Kernel Inference for Terrain Traversability Mapping", 2nd Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). October 2018.
< pdf , video > - K. Doherty, G. Flaspohler, N. Roy, and Y. Girdhar, "Approximate Distributed Spatiotemporal Topic Models for Multi-Robot Terrain Characterization", IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). October 2018. < pdf >
Best Paper Award Finalist (6 finalists of 1,254 accepted)
