Karl's Bio

Robotic Mobility Group Director
Karl Iagnemma is a principal research scientist in the Mechanical Engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He has performed postdoctoral research at MIT, and has been a visiting researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece). He currently serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the Journal of Field Robotics.

Dr. Iagnemma's primary research interests are in the areas of design, sensing, motion planning, and control of mobile robots in outdoor terrain, including modeling and analysis of robot-terrain interaction. He is author of the monograph Mobile Robots in Rough Terrain: Estimation, Planning and Control with Application to Planetary Rovers (Springer, 2004). He has recently led research programs for agencies including the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, the Army Research Office, DARPA, the NASA Mars Program Office, Ford Motor Company, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, among others. He has authored or co-authored many conference and journal papers on a wide range of robotic topics, and has consulted for various private companies and government agencies.

Dr. Iagnemma was chosen as one of 16 people who redefined science in 2003 by SEED magazine. He was a 2005 nominee for a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.