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My name is Dan. I am roboticist interested in everything related to robotic state estimation and mapping! I received my Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Michael Kaess and am currently working as a research scientist at FieldAI.

My research goal is to develop holistic robot perception that enables robots and multi-robot teams to understand their relation to an environment (State Estimation) as well as provide a deep contextual understanding of that environment (Mapping). Specifically, I want to build perception algorithms that scale to the needs of future applications and are actually deployable in the real-world.

In my undergrad career I worked with Professor Taskin Padir and a fantastic team on NASA’s Mars Ice Challenge, and started Northeastern’s Chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (NUSEDS).

For more info on my research projects check out my research page.

For examples of my various software projects checkout my github page.

Updates

  • Feb, 2026
    • We had three papers accepted to ICRA 2026!
      • “COSMO-Bench: A Benchmark for Collaborative SLAM Optimization” - Led by myself
      • “FORM: Fixed-Lag Odometry with Reparative Mapping utilizing Rotating LiDAR Sensors” - Led by Easton Potokar
      • “CU-Multi: A Dataset for Multi-Robot Collaborative Perception” - Led by Doncey Albin
  • Jan, 2026
    • My first contribution at FieldAI “GrndCtrl: Grounding World Models via Self-Supervised Reward Alignment” (led by Haoyang He) was accepted to the 2026 World Modeling Workshop
  • Oct, 2025
    • I started as a Research Scientist at FieldAI!
  • Sept, 2025
    • I successfully defended my Thesis! “Robust Incremental Distributed Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping”
    • Huge thanks to my advisor Michael Kaess, my committee, and everyone at CMU’s Robotics Institute!
  • Dec, 2024
    • Our paper led by Easton Potokar, “Robust Preintegrated Wheel Odometry for Off-Road Autonomous Ground Vehicles” was accepted to RA-L
  • Oct, 2024
    • Our paper led by Will Driessen, “Monocular Horizon Navigation” was accepted to the 4th Space Imaging Workshop
  • May, 2024
    • My paper “iMESA: Incremental Distributed Optimization for Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping” was accepted to RSS 2024
  • April, 2024
    • My 2024 ICRA paper “Asynchronous Distributed Smoothing and Mapping via On-Manifold Consensus ADMM” was nominated for IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems
  • Jan, 2024
    • My paper “Asynchronous Distributed Smoothing and Mapping via On-Manifold Consensus ADMM” was accepted to ICRA 2024
  • May, 2023
    • I started by internship with NASA JPL where I will work on the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) project!
  • Jan, 2023
    • My paper “Robust Incremental Smoothing and Mapping (riSAM) was accepted to ICRA 2023
  • June, 2022
    • I started my internship with NASA Goddard where I will spend the summer researching methods for Lunar localization.
  • April, 2022
    • I was accepted the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program!