Carlo Tomasi

Stanford University, Robotics Research (United States)

Papers

Total Citations

106

H-Index

About

Carlo Tomasi is a leading figure in computer vision and robotics, with foundational contributions to autonomous navigation and visual perception. His research focuses on enabling mobile robots to perceive and interact with their environments through passive vision systems, depth estimation, and intelligent tracking. Tomasi's most influential work, "Mobile robot obstacle avoidance via depth from focus" (1997, 48 citations), introduced a novel passive vision system that reliably recovers coarse depth information to detect both moving and static obstacles, addressing a critical challenge in autonomous robotics. He further advanced the field with "An intelligent observer" (1997, 37 citations), which laid groundwork for autonomous visual tracking. His development of the Autonomous Observer (AO) system—a mobile robot equipped with visual sensors that applies tracking and motion planning to follow designated targets—enabled remote experimentation in robotics over the Internet, expanding possibilities for distributed research. Through these contributions, Tomasi has shaped modern approaches to obstacle avoidance and visual tracking, with his work continuing to influence autonomous systems and computer vision research.