Michael Benjamin is a Principal Research Scientist in the Center for Ocean Engineering, part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems and the Marine Robotics Group within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Prior to joining MIT, he worked at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, until December 2010. In October 2014, under his leadership, his students competed in and won the 2014 International Maritime RobotX Challenge.

Michael Benjamin’s research focuses on algorithms and software for autonomous marine vehicles. In 2007, he founded moos-ivp.org at MIT, which hosts the MOOS-IvP open-source project dedicated to marine autonomy software. A key element of this project is a behavior-based architecture for autonomous decision-making, leveraging multi-objective optimization through interval programming to reconcile competing behaviors. His work is driven by the view that multi-objective optimization is essential to robust decision-making. Furthermore, structuring decision-making problems into distinct, specialized components facilitates the development of autonomous systems that can incorporate contributions from diverse developers and organizations. This approach also enables systems that combine public open-source general-purpose code with non-public, specialized components.