Brett Browning

About

Brett Browning is a robotics researcher whose work spans robot learning, autonomous systems, multiagent planning, and human-robot interaction. He is perhaps best known as a co-author of the landmark 2008 survey "A Survey of Robot Learning from Demonstration," one of the most influential papers in robotics with over 3,200 citations, which comprehensively mapped the field of teaching robots through example rather than explicit programming. Building on this foundation, Browning developed algorithms enabling robots to learn control policies through interactive teacher feedback, advancing more natural and efficient robot training paradigms. His research extends into practical field robotics, including visual SLAM for localization, actuated LiDAR calibration, and pioneering vision-based pipe inspection systems for the natural gas industry — work with direct industrial safety applications. In multiagent systems, Browning contributed to opponent-adaptive play selection for robot soccer teams, demonstrating how coordinated autonomous teams can operate in adversarial environments. He has also explored human-robot teaming through sliding autonomy frameworks and investigated the social dimensions of robotics, arguing compellingly for believable robot characters in human-robot interaction. Across these diverse domains, Browning's contributions reflect a career committed to making robots more capable, cooperative, and genuinely useful in real-world settings.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A survey of robot learning from demonstration

   3,252 citations · 2008
2. 2
   Learning by demonstration with critique from a human teacher

   103 citations · 2007
3. 3
   Plays as Effective Multiagent Plans Enabling Opponent-Adaptive Play Selection

   70 citations · 2018
4. 4
   COP-SLAM: Closed-Form Online Pose-Chain Optimization for Visual SLAM

   69 citations · 2015
5. 5
   Visual mapping for natural gas pipe inspection

   68 citations · 2014
6. 6
   Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters

   59 citations · 2014
7. 7
   Believable Robot Characters

   55 citations · 2011
8. 8
   Sliding Autonomy for Peer-To-Peer Human-Robot Teams

   47 citations · 2008
9. 9
   xBots: An approach to generating and executing optimal multi-robot plans with cross-schedule dependencies

   44 citations · 2012
10. 10
    Pipe mapping with monocular fisheye imagery

    35 citations · 2013

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links