2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award recipients announced!

 

 

Heartfelt congratulations to Tomas Lozano-Perez and Jean-Claude Latombe, selected recipients of the prestigious 2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award for "For foundational contributions to robot motion planning and visionary leadership of the field." They will receive this award during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Prague, Czech Republic on 27 September-1 October 2021.

The groundbreaking contributions of Tomas Lozano-Perez 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-Perez 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-Perez’s work provided the foundation for motion planning and inspired Latombe’s classic textbook Robot Motion Planning (Springer, 1991). Latombe co-developed 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.

An IEEE Fellow, Tomas Lozano-Perez is the School of Engineering Professor in Teaching Excellence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

 

Jean-Claude Latombe is the Kumagai Professor Emeritus with the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

 

 

 

 

More About the IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award was established in 2002 by the IEEE Board of Directors, and is presented for contributions in the field of robotics and automation. It includes but is not limited to: manufacturing automation; robotics and automation in unstructured environments; sensor design; integration and fusion; robot design; modeling; planning and control; methodologies for robotics and automation, and the quality of the nomination. This Award is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society.

Past Recipients can be found HERE