G.N. Patterson Lecture

Lecturer: Professor Tim Barfoot

I am deeply honoured to be this year’s Gordon N. Patterson Lecturer. Almost 30 years ago, as a young graduate student, I set out to build the next generation of Canadian space robots. This of course turned out to be a much longer and more difficult process than I imagined. Along the way, my career was pulled in many different and exciting directions, taking me away from space robotics. However, with renewed Canadian interest in lunar exploration, particularly a program called the Lunar Utility Vehicle, my original dream is hopefully coming back to life. I will tell my story as a mixture of history, career retrospective, and research highlights.

Biography

Professor Tim Barfoot (UTIAS) works in the area of autonomy for mobile robots targeting a variety of applications. e is interested in developing methods (localization, mapping, planning, control) to allow robots to operate over long periods of time in largescale, unstructured, three-dimensional environments, using rich onboard sensing (e.g., cameras, laser rangefinders, radar) and computation. Timothy holds a BASc (9T6+PEY, Aerospace Option) from the UofT Engineering Science program and a PhD from UTIAS in robotics. He took up his academic position at UTIAS in May 2007, after spending four years at MDA Robotics (builder of the well-known Canadarm space manipulators), where he developed autonomous vehicle navigation technologies for both planetary rovers and terrestrial applications such as underground mining. He is an IEEE Fellow, held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) for the full 10 years, was an Early Researcher Awardee in the Province of Ontario, and has received three paper awards at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010, 2021, 2025) as well as four at the Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV 2014, 2016, 2023, 2025). Timothy was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford in 2013 and 2024 and worked as Director of Autonomous Systems at Apple in California in 2017-9. He is Director of the UofT Robotics Institute, Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute, co-Faculty Advisor of UofT's self-driving car team that won the SAE Autodrive competition several times, and was previously Chair of the UofT Engineering Science Robotics Major. He is the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics (T-FR), deputy EiC of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), served on the Foundation Board of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), and served as the General Chair of Field and Service Robotics (FSR) 2015, which was held in Toronto. He is the author of State Estimation for Robotics (Cambridge 2017, 2024), which is free to download from his webpage, and co-editor/coauthor of the SLAM Handbook (Cambridge 2025).