Golden Speaker Series with Michael Benjamin: Autonomy and Unmanned Marine Vehicles

Speakers:

Michael Benjamin
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
11:30am – 12:15pm (Online Event)
*MIT Community Only* (Register)

Join MIT’s Technology Licensing Office for a talk with MIT Sea Grant funded researcher and collaborator, Michael Benjamin, on January 28. Benjamin is a principal research scientist with MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering and also leads the Marine Autonomy Lab. His research focus is on autonomy algorithms and software for unmanned marine vehicles, and his work with MIT Sea Grant includes the project, “Application of an Autonomous Sailboat for Fish Population Monitoring” funded through our Core RFP.

Register here for the online event and view more about the series via MIT’s Technology Licensing Office: https://tlo.mit.edu/events/golden-speaker-series-michael-benjamin.

About the Speaker

Michael Benjamin, Principal Research Scientist

Michael Benjamin is a principal research scientist at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research focus is on autonomy algorithms and software for unmanned marine vehicles. In 2005 he founded an open source project named moos-ivp.org comprising dozens of marine autonomy applications including the IvP Helm for autonomous decision making, and COLREGS autonomy on unmanned surface vessels. His software is used on many different types of unmanned marine vehicles around the world.

Benjamin received BS and MS degrees in computer science and cognitive science from Rensselaer, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Brown University. Prior to coming to MIT, he was a research scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and was the 2005 NAVSEA Scientist of the Year. Since the Spring of 2012 he has developed and taught a course in unmanned marine vehicle autonomy at MIT to undergraduates and graduate students, and has led the startup of a new laboratory facility for marine autonomy on the Charles River on the MIT campus.