Alan Papalia

I am actively recruiting PhD students for the upcoming year

I am joining the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in the NAME department. If you're interested in developing robots that can operate independently in unstructured and remote environments, please see the information below on working with me and then email me.

A bit about me

I am an incoming Assistant Professor to the University of Michigan. I am spending 2025 as a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, working with Hanu Singh and Michael Everett on various problems in field robotics and robotic navigation. I received my PhD in 2024 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, where I worked with a tremendous group of people in the Marine Robotics Group under the supervision of John Leonard.

My research develops fundamental capabilities for field robotics, with a focus on building the tools necessary for autonomous ocean observation and maintaining the health of our planet. I believe that robotics has a critical role to play in understanding and protecting our world, particularly in the face of climate change. My work seeks to identify problems where robotics can make a meaningful difference and develop the algorithms and systems necessary to unlock this impact.

My PhD research focused on enabling long-term, low-cost underwater navigation (a serious limitation to widespread autonomous ocean observation). This direction led to the development of a state-of-the-art SLAM backend – built on tools from optimization, geometry, and graph theory – that is both faster than existing methods and provides rigorous performance guarantees. This paints a picture of future work I am interested in: solving fundamental robotics problems that are motivated by important societal challenges.

Honors and Awards

2024 Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award
MathWorks Fellow
Woods Hole Next Wave Fellow
Undersea Technology Innovation Scholar

Want to work with me?

See the information on my Join Us page for how to reach out if you are interested in working with me. I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and University of Michigan undergraduate students. I may not be hiring now, but will keep your email for future reference when I am looking to hire for a position so please do not hesitate to reach out.

Select publications

An Overview of the Burer-Monteiro Method for Certifiable Robot Perception

Alan Papalia, Yulun Tian, David M. Rosen, Jonathan P. How, and John J. Leonard

arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00117, 2024

arXiv Bib

@article{papalia2024overview,
  title = {An Overview of the Burer-Monteiro Method for Certifiable Robot Perception},
  author = {Papalia, Alan and Tian, Yulun and Rosen, David M. and How, Jonathan P. and Leonard, John J.},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00117},
  year = {2024},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Certifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM

Alan Papalia, Andrew Fishberg, Brendan W. O’Neill, Jonathan P. How, David M. Rosen, and John J. Leonard

IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024

arXiv Bib

@article{papalia24cora,
  author = {Papalia, Alan and Fishberg, Andrew and O'Neill, Brendan W. and How, Jonathan P. and Rosen, David M. and Leonard, John J.},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Robotics},
  title = {Certifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM},
  year = {2024},
  volume = {40},
  number = {},
  pages = {4265-4283},
  keywords = {Simultaneous localization and mapping;Robots;Optimization;Certification;Sensors;Manifolds;Extraterrestrial measurements;Certifiable perception;range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM);Riemannian Staircase;semidefinite programming;ultrawideband (UWB)},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

SCORE: A Second-Order Conic Initialization for Range-Aided SLAM

Alan Papalia, Joseph Morales, Kevin J. Doherty, David M. Rosen, and John J. Leonard

In IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{papalia23icra,
  title = {SCORE: A Second-Order Conic Initialization for Range-Aided SLAM},
  author = {Papalia, Alan and Morales, Joseph and Doherty, Kevin J. and Rosen, David M. and Leonard, John J.},
  booktitle = {IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  year = {2023},
}