Georgios Georgakis

I am a Robotics Technologist at the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning, with applications in robotics. My long-term goal is enabling the exploration and understanding of our solar system by developing generalizable, learning-based perception and navigation algorithms for robotic systems, and by designing AI models that maximize the scientific return from space mission data.

Prior to joining JPL, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Kostas Daniilidis. During my PostDoc I worked on vision-based semantic navigation in novel environments for the tasks of exploration, object-goal navigation, and vision and language navigation (VLN). I received my Ph.D from the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, advised by Jana Kosecka. I completed my Diploma in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete in Greece, where I worked with Dr. Michail G. Lagoudakis on landmark recognition and localization for robotic soccer.

I spent time as a research intern at Siemens and United Imaging Intelligence (UII). My method for 3D human reconstruction was integrated in a new generation of medical CT scanners capable of modeling patients in 3D and automating the scanning process. The scanners have been deployed in more than 300 hospitals worldwide including in Cyprus!

Email / CV / Scholar / LinkedIn / Github

Papers

	A Map-based Localization System for Ingenuity using Deep Image Matching Georgios Georgakis, Dario Pisanti, Nathan Williams, Cecilia Mauceri, Gerik Kubiak, Adnan Ansar, Roland Brockers IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics (T-FR) Special Issue on Space Robotics, 2025 pdf
	Visual Perception Engine: Fast and Flexible Multi-Head Inference for Robotic Vision Tasks Jakub Lucki, Jonathan Becktor, Georgios Georgakis, Rob Royce, Shehryar Khattak arXiv:2508.11584 (under submission), 2025 pdf / code
	Robust Visual Localization in Compute-Constrained Environments by Salient Edge Rendering and Weighted Hamming Similarity Tu-Hoa Pham, Philip Bailey, Daniel Posada, Georgios Georgakis, Jorge Enriquez, Surya Suresh, Marco Dolci, Philip Twu IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025 pdf
	Risk-Guided Diffusion: Toward Deploying Robot Foundation Models In Space, Where Failure Is Not An Option Rohan Thakker, Adarsh Patnaik, Vince Kurtz, Jonas Frey, Jonathan Becktor, Sangwoo Moon, Rob Royce, Marcel Kaufmann, Georgios Georgakis, Pascal Roth, Joel Burdick, Marco Hutter, Shehryar Khattak Workshop on Reliable Robotics: Safety and Security in the Face of Generative AI at RSS, 2025 (Best paper award) pdf
	General-Purpose Robotic Navigation via LVLM-Orchestrated Perception, Reasoning, and Acting Bernard Lange, Anil Yildiz, Mansur Arief, Shehryar Khattak, Mykel Kochenderfer, Georgios Georgakis arXiv:2506.17462 (under submission), 2025 pdf
	Vision-based Geo-Localization of Future Mars Rotorcraft in Challenging Illumination Conditions Dario Pisanti, Robert Hewitt, Roland Brockers, Georgios Georgakis arXiv:2502.09795 (under submission), 2025 pdf / code-MbL / code-MARTIAN
	Enhancing the Quality of 3D Lunar Maps Using JAXA’s Kaguya Imagery Yumi Iwashita, Haakon Moe, Yang Cheng, Adnan Ansar, Georgios Georgakis, Adrian Stoica, Kazuto Nakashima, Ryo Kurazume, Jim Torresen IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2025 pdf
	Illumination Invariant Image Matching for Lunar TRN Noah Rothenberger, Georgios Georgakis, Yang Chen, Adnan Ansar American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech, 2025 pdf
	NAVCON: A Cognitively Inspired and Linguistically Grounded Corpus for Vision and Language Navigation Karan Wanchoo, Xiaoye Zuo, Hannah Gonzalez, Soham Dan, Georgios Georgakis, Dan Roth, Kostas Daniilidis, Eleni Miltsakaki arXiv:2412.13026, 2024 pdf
	Learning Illumination Invariant Features for Lunar South Pole with Deep Learning Georgios Georgakis, Adnan Ansar Space Imaging Workshop (SIW), 2024 pdf
	Pixel to Elevation: Learning to Predict Elevation Maps at Long Range using Images for Autonomous Offroad Navigation Chanyoung Chung, Georgios Georgakis, Patrick Spieler, Curtis Padgett, Ali Agha, Shehryar Khattak IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024 pdf / arXiv
	Icy Moon Surface Simulation and Stereo Depth Estimation for Sampling Autonomy Ramchander Bhaskara, Georgios Georgakis, Jeremy Nash, Marissa Cameron, Joseph Bowkett, Adnan Ansar, Manoranjan Majji, Paul Backes IEEE Aerospace Conference (AeroConf), 2024 pdf / arXiv / code
	Unordered Navigation to Multiple Semantic Targets in Novel Environments Bernadette Bucher, Katrina Ashton, Bo Wu, Karl Schmeckpeper, Siddharth Goel, Nikolai Matni, Georgios Georgakis, Kostas Daniilidis Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR, 2023 * equal contribution pdf
	Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasets Frederick Ebert, Yanlai Yang, Karl Schmeckpeper, Bernadette Bucher, Georgios Georgakis, Kostas Daniilidis, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2022 * equal contribution project page / pdf / arXiv
	Cross-modal Map Learning for Vision and Language Navigation Georgios Georgakis, Karl Schmeckpeper, Karan Wanchoo, Soham Dan, Eleni Miltsakaki, Dan Roth, Kostas Daniilidis IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022 project page / pdf / arXiv / code / talk video
	Learning to Map for Active Semantic Goal Navigation Georgios Georgakis, Bernadette Bucher, Karl Schmeckpeper, Siddharth Singh , Kostas Daniilidis International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022 * equal contribution project page / pdf / arXiv / code
	Uncertainty-driven Planner for Exploration and Navigation Georgios Georgakis, Bernadette Bucher, Anton Arapin, Karl Schmeckpeper, Nikolai Matni, Kostas Daniilidis IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022 project page / pdf / arXiv / code / Demo @ICRA
	Object-centric Video Prediction without Annotation Karl Schmeckpeper, Georgios Georgakis*, Kostas Daniilidis IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021 equal contribution pdf / arXiv / code / slides video
	Hierarchical Kinematic Human Mesh Recovery Georgios Georgakis, Ren Li, Srikrishna Karanam, Terrence Chen, Jana Kosecka, Ziyan Wu European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 * equal contribution pdf / supplementary / arXiv / long slides / short slides / long video / short video
	Robust Multi-modal 3D Patient Body Modeling Fan Yang, Ren Li, Georgios Georgakis, Srikrishna Karanam, Terrence Chen, Haibin Ling, Ziyan Wu Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI), 2020 * equal contribution pdf
	Simultaneous Mapping and Target Driven Navigation Georgios Georgakis, Yimeng Li, Jana Kosecka arXiv:1911.07980, 2020 pdf / code
	Towards Robust RGB-D Human Mesh Recovery Ren Li, Changjiang Cai, Georgios Georgakis, Srikrishna Karanam, Terrence Chen, Ziyan Wu arXiv:1911.07383, 2019 pdf
	Learning Local RGB-to-CAD Correspondences for Object Pose Estimation Georgios Georgakis, Srikrishna Karanam, Ziyan Wu, Jana Kosecka IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 pdf / slides / poster
	End-to-end Learning for Keypoint Detection and Descriptor for Pose Invariant 3D Matching Georgios Georgakis, Srikrishna Karanam, Ziyan Wu, Jan Ernst, Jana Kosecka IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018 pdf / supplementary / poster
	Label Propagation in RGB-D Video Md Alimoor Reza, Hui Zheng, Georgios Georgakis, Jana Kosecka IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017 pdf
	Synthesizing Training Data for Object Detection in Indoor Scenes Georgios Georgakis, Arsalan Mousavian, Alexander C. Berg, Jana Kosecka Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2017 project page / pdf / poster / slides / video
	A Contact Exploitative Approach to the Amazon Robotics Challenge Eadom Dessalene, Georgios Georgakis, Md Alimoor Reza, Yimeng Li, Yossi Ovcharik, Amir Shapiro, Jana Kosecka, Daniel Lofaro Warehouse Picking Automation Workshop at ICRA, 2017 pdf
	Multiview RGB-D Dataset for Object Instance Detection Georgios Georgakis, Md Alimoor Reza, Arsalan Mousavian, Le Phi-Hung, Jana Kosecka International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2016 project page / pdf / arXiv / poster
	RGB-D Multiview Object Detection with Object Proposals and Shape Context Georgios Georgakis, Md Alimoor Reza, Jana Kosecka IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016 pdf / poster / short slides / code

Teaching	Instructor, University of Pennsylvania ESE 650 Learning in Robotics, Spring 2022 Website / Notes: Spring 2021 from Pratik Chaudhari Graduate Teaching Assistant, George Mason University CS112: Introduction to Programming, 2014-2017 CS480: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, 2019
Awards	Team Award, “For Lunar Navigation Maps (LuNaMaps) project to address key gaps in mapping for Lunar TRN” Robotic Systems Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, September 2025 Team Award, “For technical contributions and leadership in advancing robotic autonomy” Robotic Systems Section, Jet Propulsion Lab, September 2025 Technology Spotlight Award, “Map-based Localization for Ingenuity flights” Autonomous Systems Division, Jet Propulsion Lab, August 2025 Technology Spotlight Award, “Photometric Calibration of JunoCam with a Data-driven Method” Autonomous Systems Division, Jet Propulsion Lab, May 2024
Selected Talks	Approximate Photometric Calibrations of JunoCam with a Deep Learning System (slides) Invited talk at Juno Science Team Meeting, September 2025 Learning Illumination Invariant Features for Lunar South Pole with Deep Learning (slides) Space Imaging Workshop at Georgia Tech, October 2024 Vision-based Navigation in Novel Environments (slides) Invited talk at Jet Propulsion Lab, Robotic Systems Section, July 2022 Cross-modal Map Learning for Vision and Language Navigation (talk video) GRASP SFI Seminar Series, Philadelphia PA, April 2022
Selected Patents	Method and System for On-board Localization, Roland Brockers, Friedrich Dietsche, Jeff Delaune, Pedro Proença, Robert Hewitt, Georgios Georgakis US18/312,444 filed May 2023, Application no. US20230360547A1 Systems and Methods for Human Pose and Mesh Recovery, Ziyan Wu, Srikrishna Karanam, Changjiang Cai, Georgios Georgakis US16/995,446, filed August 2020, Application no. US20210158028A1 Learning Keypoints and Matching RGB Images to CAD Models, Georgios Georgakis, Srikrishna Karanam, Ziyan Wu, Jan Ernst PCT/US2019/053827, filed September 2019, Application no. WO2020086217

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website

Papers

Teaching

Awards

Selected Talks

Selected Patents