When Vasileios Tzoumas, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), visits a new city, he likes to explore by going for a run. And sometimes he gets lost. A few years ago, on a long run while in Osaka for a conference, the inevitable happened. But then Tzoumas spotted a 7-Eleven he remembered passing soon after leaving his hotel. This recognition allowed him to mentally "close the loop," to connect the loose end of his trajectory to someplace he knew and was sure about, thus solidifying his mental map and allowing him to make his way back to the hotel.

Robot perception relies on sensors that often provide noisy or misleading inputs. MIT's GNC algorithm allows the robot to decide which data points to trust and which to discard. One application of the GNC algorithm is called shape alignment. A robot estimates the 3D location and orientation of a car using 2D camera images. The robot receives a camera image with many points labeled by a feature-detection algorithm: headlights, wheels, mirrors.