Samuel Prentice

Papers

Total Citations

451

H-Index

About

Samuel Prentice is a robotics researcher whose work has significantly advanced the field of autonomous navigation, particularly for aerial and ground-based robots operating in challenging, GPS-denied environments. His research sits at the intersection of state estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and motion planning, with a focus on enabling robots to navigate reliably without traditional positioning infrastructure. Prentice's most influential contribution, "RANGE: Robust Autonomous Navigation in GPS-Denied Environments" (2011), garnered 284 citations and demonstrated a complete system allowing quadrotor helicopters to autonomously explore and map unknown indoor spaces using laser range finders. Building on this momentum, his 2012 work on RGB-D camera-based estimation and mapping accumulated 164 citations, helping establish depth cameras as a viable, low-cost alternative for mobile robotics perception. Together, these papers helped define foundational approaches still referenced in aerial robotics research today. More recently, Prentice has turned his attention to far-field traversability mapping for natural environments, addressing the limitations of purely local sensing in unstructured terrain. This trajectory—from indoor aerial navigation to outdoor ground robot perception—reflects a career consistently pushing the boundaries of robust autonomy across diverse and challenging operational domains.