Masahiro (Hiro) Ono is a Research Technologist and the Group Supervisor of the Robotic Surface Mobility Group. His primary interest is to enable the exploration of previously inaccessible planetary destinations through innovative robotic systems, combining versatile mobility and intelligent onboard autonomy. To this goal, he led a number of high-profile research projects. Most notably, he served as the PI of the EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) project, which received ~$15M investment to develop a snake-like robot for enabling the exploration of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus through its erupting vent. Previously, he led the MAARS (Machine learning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems) project to explore a new paradigm of planetary surface exploration with a highly automated system. Other projects that he led include three NIAC studies on Enceladus Vent Explorer (Phase I and II) and Comet Hitchhiker (Phase I), funded by NASA's STMD, as well as the Human-cooperative Risk-aware Autonomy project funded by ONR.
He also has substantial flight project experiences, particularly on the Mars 2020 Rover Mission, where he led the Surface Traversability Analysis for the landing selection, developed the enhanced autonomous driving capability, and supported tactical uplink and downlink operations of the rover. He received JPL's Software of the Year Award in 2021 for the ML-based terrain classifier, which was used for the M2020 landing selection and MSL ground operation. He also ran a highly successful crowdsourcing project called AI4Mars to collect the training dataset for the terrain classifier, which was participated by ~17K volunteers on the internet. Previously, he also contributed to the development of autonomous sampling site selection for Europa Lander.
- PhD, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012
- MS, Technology and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012
- MS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007
- BS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, The University of Tokyo, 2005
- Research Technologist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (2013 - )
- Research Associate (equivalent of tenure-track faculty), Keio University (2012-2013)
Planetary robotic systems, robotic autonomy, surface mobility, machine learning, risk-aware planning
Papers (Google Scholar): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EUeMNlsAAAAJ&hl=en&authuser=1&oi=ao
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