Nicholas Roy is the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics in MIT's School of Engineering and Director of Systems Engineering at the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing's Quest for Intelligence. He is a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and leads the Robust Robotics Group, which develops software enabling unmanned vehicles to operate autonomously in air, ground, and water domains without human supervision, executing complex missions over long durations alongside humans. Roy chairs the Undergraduate Committee in his department and teaches courses on principles of autonomy and decision-making, real-time systems and software, and robotics science and systems.

Roy earned a B.Sc. in Physics with a minor in Cognitive Science from McGill University in 1995 (graduated with distinction), an M.Sc. in Computer Science from McGill University in 1997 (Dean's Honours List), and a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 under supervisors Sebastian Thrun and Tom Mitchell. During graduate studies, he held the Fonds FCAR Ph.D. Fellowship (1997-2001) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Scholarship (1997). Joining MIT post-Ph.D., he advanced to full professor and, on sabbatical, founded and led Project Wing at Google X, developing prototype drone-delivery systems. His research centers on robotics, machine learning, autonomous systems, planning and reasoning under uncertainty, human-computer interaction, and micro air vehicles. Developments include algorithms coupling perception and decision-making for robust operation in dynamic environments without GPS, predictive planning from experience, natural language model learning, and GPS-free urban navigation for UAVs and ground vehicles. Key publications comprise 'Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva' (International Journal of Robotics Research, 2000), 'Collaborative Robot Exploration and Rendezvous: Algorithms, Performance Bounds and Observations' (Autonomous Robots, 2001), and 'Toward Optimal Active Learning through Monte Carlo Estimation of Error Reduction' (ICML, 2001). With over 33,800 citations and h-index of 89, his work influences autonomous robotics; he earned MIT's Committed to Caring award in 2019.

Professional Email: nickroy@mit.edu