Nicholas ROY

Nicholas Roy is the Bisplinghoff Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph. D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Roy’s research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, mobile robot autonomy and human-robot interaction. He is interested in how robots should make decisions about how to act when they have noisy sensors and imperfect knowledge of a dynamic world, and how those robots should work in teams with people and other robots.

Roy has applied his research to a wide variety of real-world applications, such as aerial drones and ground robots in disaster response facilities, aerial drones performing search and rescue in forests, and robots in factories to assist with plant maintenance. Roy has collaborated on autonomous submersibles that map hydrothermal plumes to create new models of climate change. Roy’s research has been recognised with numerous awards, including best paper awards at Robotics Science and Systems and the IEEE International Conference for Robotics and Automation. He and his students have won awards for system development, including awards from the MAV and AUVSI IARC competitions, and an AUVSI XCELLENCE award for Humanitarian Projects for his work in autonomous systems for search and rescue.

Roy’s research has been transitioned into multiple commercial applications. He and his students founded Project Wing, the Alphabet [X] drone delivery project. His students founded Skydio, the autonomous drone manufacturer, and Roy is an advisor to the company. Roy’s students founded Strio, which was acquired by Zoox, the self-driving car company, and Roy is currently on leave from MIT as a Principal Software Engineer at Zoox.

Lastly, Roy has a strong interest in how natural intelligence informs our understanding of artificial intelligence. He is the Director of Systems Engineering within MIT’s Quest for Intelligence, where he advises a team of engineers building a system to integrate computational models of natural intelligence and benchmark their performance against artificially intelligent systems, as a way to develop new understanding of the foundations of intelligence.