Rate My Professor Maurice Fallon

Maurice Fallon is Professor of Robotics in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Dynamic Robot Systems Group (Perception) within the Oxford Robotics Institute. He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow since October 2017 and a Research Fellow of Wolfson College, having been promoted to full professor in 2025. Fallon studied Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin and obtained his PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2008, with research on acoustic source tracking. Immediately after his PhD, he joined MIT as a postdoctoral researcher and later research scientist in the Marine Robotics Group from 2008 to 2012. From 2012 to 2015, he served as the perception lead for MIT's team in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Prior to Oxford, he was a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.

Fallon's research focuses on probabilistic methods for localization and mapping, state estimation for legged robots, dynamic motion planning and control, and developing robust sensor fusion techniques for challenging environments including darkness, underground settings, and outdoors. As principal investigator or co-investigator, he has contributed to major projects such as ORCA, RAIN, THING, MEMMO, the DARPA Subterranean Challenge-winning team CERBERUS, the EU Horizon Europe project DigiForest, and UKAEA's RACE programme. His scholarly output exceeds 7000 citations, with key publications including “Building Forest Inventories With Autonomous Legged Robots—System, Lessons, and Challenges Ahead” (2025, IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics), “The Oxford Spires Dataset: Benchmarking large-scale LiDAR-visual localisation, reconstruction and radiance field methods” (2025, The International Journal of Robotics Research), and “Wild visual navigation: fast traversability learning via pre-trained models and online self-supervision” (2025, Autonomous Robots). Fallon is an IEEE Senior Member and co-recipient of the University of Oxford MPLS Commercial Impact Award in 2025 for NavLive. His publications have garnered best paper awards or nominations at ICRA four times, as well as at Intelligent Vehicles, AAAI, and Humanoids conferences.