Dominic Maggio drmaggio {at} mit {dot} edu Hello! My name is Dominic Maggio and I'm a PhD candidate at MIT working on spatial scene understanding for robotics focusing on Open-Set Semantic Mapping, Monocular Localization, and 3D Scene Representations. I'm advised by Luca Carlone in the SPARK Lab. I obtained double major bachelor degrees in Aerospace Engineering and in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2021 with a 5.0/5.0 GPA and a Masters in Aerospace Engineering from MIT in 2023.

Research

• Form Open-Set 3D Semantic maps at the correct granulatity (i.e., what is an object) to support an agents tasks.
• Combining semantic information across multiple views to get an overall semantic understanding of the scene.
• Monocular camera pose estimation with lightweight memory and computation usage.
• Creating new efficient spatial and memory models of the 3D scene for both localization and semantic understanding.

Awards and News

• Draper Fellowship - Funded Masters Program in collaboration with Draper Labs 2021-2023
• NSF GRFP Fellowship - Funded PhD Program 2023-2026
• Clio featured on the front page of MIT News.
• Work on terrain relative navigation features in Aerospace America
• Work on terrain relative navigation features in Interesting Engineering
• Featured personally in multi-page article in Catholic High School Bear Facts.

Publications

Bayesian Fields: Task-driven Open-Set Semantic Gaussian Splatting

Dominic Maggio, and Luca Carlone

arxiv 2025 availible soon



Clio: Real-time Task-Driven Open-Set 3D Scene Graphs

Dominic Maggio, Yun Chang, Nathan Hughes, Matthew Trang, Dan Griffith, Carlyn Dougherty, Eric Cristofalo, Lukas Schmid, and Luca Carlone

RAL 2024

🔥 Featured Front Page of MIT News

Paper  /  Github  /  Video  /  MIT News



VERF: Runtime Monitoring of Pose Estimation with Neural Radiance Fields

Dominic Maggio, Courtney Mario, and Luca Carlone

RAL 2023

Paper



Loc-NeRF: Monte Carlo Localization using Neural Radiance Fields

Dominic Maggio, Marcus Abate, Jingnan Shi, Courtney Mario, and Luca Carlone

ICRA 2023

Paper  /  Github  /  Video



Vision-based Terrain Relative Navigation on High Altitude Balloon and Sub-orbital Rocket

Dominic Maggio, Courtney Mario, Brett Streetman, Ted Steiner, and Luca Carlone

SciTech 2023

🔥 Featured in Articles in Aerospace America, Interesting Engineering and Draper News

Paper  /  Aerospace America  /  Interesting Engineering  /  Draper News



Stochastic Optimization for Motion Planning of Helicopter and Underwater Vehicles Reposition Task

Dominic Maggio, Navid Dadkhah Tehrani, Igor Cherepinsky, and Sean Carlson

IEEE Aerospace 2021

Paper

Thesis

Visual Terrain Relative Navigation: Pose Estimation, Neural Fields, and Verification

Dominic Maggio

MIT Master's Thesis

Paper

Work

• Apple Technology Investigation Intern. Summer 2023
• Aptiv Perception and Sensor Fusion Intern. Summer 2021
• Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky Autonomy Division R&D Intern. Summer 2020
• Millennium Space Systems Thermal Engineering Intern and Project Manager. Winter 2020
• Draper Laboratory Perception and Autonomy Division Intern. Summer 2019
• MIT Aerospace Controls Lab Undergraduate Researcher 2019-2020
• MIT Space Systems Lab Lab Undergraduate Researcher, Head of thermal sub-team. 2018-2019

Services

• Reviewed for ICRA, IROS, RA-L, CVPR, IJRR, T-RO
• Co-Instructed MIT 16.633 Junior Seminar: Autonomous Machines. Designed course material and gave lectures on an introduction seminar to computer vision and autonomous drones for undergraduates in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 .
• Served as Teaching Assistant to MIT 16.485 Visual Navigation for Autonomous Vehicles in Fall 2023.
• Graduate Resident Assistant (GRA) for New Vassar (MIT Dormitory).
• Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Advisor. Advise undergraduates on research projects.