About
My name is Dan. I am a robotics researcher who designs and deploys novel theory and algorithms for collaborative perception. The goal of my research is to develop fundamental theory that enables scalable multi-robot teams to operate autonomously in challenging, unstructured, real-world deployments.
I received my Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Michael Kaess and am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan with Alan Papalia and Maani Ghaffari.
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).
Details
For more info on my research projects check out my research page.
For examples of my various software projects checkout my github page.
Updates
- I started as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan!
- We presented two papers at IROS 2026!
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- “GrndCtrl: Grounding World Models via Self-Supervised Reward Alignment” - Led by Haoyang He at FieldAI
- “DALEC: Efficient Distributed State Estimation for Swarm Robotics in Space and GPS-Denied Environments” - Led by Nicolas Morales at Astrobotic
- We had three papers accepted to ICRA 2026!
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- “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
- 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
- I started as a Research Scientist at FieldAI!
- 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!
- Our paper led by Easton Potokar, “Robust Preintegrated Wheel Odometry for Off-Road Autonomous Ground Vehicles” was accepted to RA-L
- Our paper led by Will Driessen, “Monocular Horizon Navigation” was accepted to the 4th Space Imaging Workshop
- My paper “iMESA: Incremental Distributed Optimization for Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping” was accepted to RSS 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
- My paper “Asynchronous Distributed Smoothing and Mapping via On-Manifold Consensus ADMM” was accepted to ICRA 2024
- I started by internship with NASA JPL where I will work on the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) project!
- My paper “Robust Incremental Smoothing and Mapping (riSAM) was accepted to ICRA 2023
- I started my internship with NASA Goddard where I will spend the summer researching methods for Lunar localization.
- I was accepted the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program!