Robert Waddington (died 1779) was a mathematician, astronomer and teacher of navigation. He is best known as one of the observers appointed by the Royal Society to observe the 1761 transit of Venus with Nevil Maskelyne on the island of Saint Helena. On that voyage they made successful use of the lunar-distance method of establishing longitude at sea. Waddington subsequently taught the method at his academy in London and published a navigation manual, A Practical Method for Finding the Longitude and Latitude of a Ship at Sea, by Observations of the Moon (1763).