Marcus Abate
PHD Student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMarcus Abate is a PhD student in MIT’s SPARK Lab specializing in embodied autonomous systems, robotic perception, and scene understanding. With an MS and BS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and eight years of hands-on experience, he focuses on building representations that enable robots to plan and operate reliably in unstructured environments. His open-source work on Kimera (including Kimera-RPGO and Kimera-VIO) demonstrates practical expertise in SLAM, loop-closure detection, and robust pose-graph optimization, with contributions that improved backend stability, parameterization, and ROS integration. He spent a summer at NASA JPL working on multicamera SLAM, underscoring a track record of applying research to real robotic platforms. Marcus combines rigorous academic training with pragmatic code-level impact, often addressing tricky memory and integration issues that make research systems production-ready.
8 years of coding experience
Master of Science - MS, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (21)
c-language10
gtsam10
computer-vision10
cprogramming-language10
slam10
ros10
robotics9
delaunay-triangulation9
yaml-configuration9
navigation-drawer9
navigationbar9
cmake9
pose-estimation9
navigationview9
python8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO-ROS
Aug 2019 - Apr 2021
ROS wrapper for Kimera-VIO
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 91 commits, 1 PR in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Marcus focused on extending the ROS wrapper for Kimera-VIO. Their contributions included adding support for different types of output information, such as optimized trajectory and pose graph, and integrating a ground-truth logger node to facilitate data analysis. They also updated parameters and implemented changes related to the Loop Closure Detector (LCD) output, which included publishing the pose graph. These changes improve the VIO's functionality and analysis capabilities.
cpureconstructionimucatkinrosbag
MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO
Jun 2019 - Apr 2021
Visual Inertial Odometry with SLAM capabilities and 3D Mesh generation.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 360 commits, 4 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Marcus's commits focus on the implementation of a Loop Closure Detector within the Kimera-VIO project, a visual-inertial odometry system. The commits reveal the addition of a loop closure detector to the pipeline, including the modification of existing files to integrate the new detector and support parameterization with YAML configurations. The developer also refactored existing code and added a simplified version of 3D pose recovery.
mesh-generationodometrysimulationinertial-odometryreal-time
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