Jean-Claude Latombe
Biography
The groundbreaking contributions of Tomás Lozano-Pérez and Jean-Claude Latombe to tackling the challenge of robot motion planning has provided robots with the ability to avoid colliding with obstacles while they navigate real-world environments. Lozano-Pérez introduced the configuration space formalization, which unified geometry, mechanics, and computation in a single general framework to address motion planning for robots with any number of degrees of freedom and shape. Lozano-Pérez’s work provided the foundation for motion planning and inspired Latombe’s classic textbook Robot Motion Planning (Springer, 1991). Latombe codeveloped the randomized potential field (RFP) planner with Jerôme Barraquand to handle robots with higher degrees of freedom. RFP was the precursor to his probabilistic roadmap planner (PRM) algorithm, co-developed with Lydia Kavraki, an example of sample-based motion planning. Latombe’s work on PRM is considered to have sparked a new era in motion planning.
Latombe is the Kumagai Professor Emeritus with the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
