Papers
78
Total Citations
2,898
H-Index
22
About
Nikolay Atanasov is a leading robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of autonomous navigation, semantic perception, and active information gathering. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), particularly his pioneering work on probabilistic semantic SLAM, which advanced the field beyond low-level geometric features to enable robots to recognize and leverage meaningful object-level landmarks — a paper that has garnered over 470 citations. His 2023 survey on active SLAM, already approaching 300 citations, has become an essential reference for researchers navigating this rapidly evolving field. Atanasov has made significant strides in autonomous aerial robotics, developing search-based motion planning algorithms for quadrotors operating in cluttered, GPS-denied environments, with multiple papers in this area exceeding 150 citations. His research also tackles the fundamental challenge of multi-robot coordination, proposing decentralized and anytime algorithms that enable robot teams to efficiently gather environmental information under real-world computational constraints. Spanning computer vision, event-based sensing, and distributed source-seeking with mobile networks, Atanasov's body of work reflects a cohesive vision: enabling robots to perceive, reason about, and act intelligently within complex, uncertain environments. His research has profoundly shaped modern autonomous systems design.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Probabilistic data association for semantic SLAM474 citations · 2017
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- 4Fast, autonomous flight in GPS‐denied and cluttered environments196 citations · 2017
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- 6Event-based feature tracking with probabilistic data association168 citations · 2017
- 7Search-Based Motion Planning for Aggressive Flight in SE(3)155 citations · 2018
- 8Anytime Planning for Decentralized Multirobot Active Information Gathering115 citations · 2018
- 9Nonmyopic View Planning for Active Object Classification and Pose Estimation82 citations · 2014
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