Welcome to the Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group, a member of the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in Smith Engineering at Queen's University. We motivate a knowledge-based approach to robotics research by taking on challenging, real-world problems. We do this to test our solutions and force us to understand the fundamental challenges of next-generation robots.
Please have a look around our website to find out more about who we are and what we do, including our publicly available code and datasets. You may also be interested in our YouTube, Bluesky, and GitHub accounts.
Nikan is researching event-camera odometry and has exciting new results with a stereo pipeline that runs in real time. The pipeline maintains the asynchronous microsecond temporal resolution of event cameras by using a continuous-time Gaussian process estimator. The work is currently under review, but you can read the open access paper on arXiv and watch the video on YouTube!
Mitchell and Tyler have an exciting paper on planning in unknown, changing, and dynamic environments at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, Austria. We show that modern a.s.a.o. planners are now so fast that it's often better to just replan from scratch instead of updating an existing plan. This work was in collaboration with Andrew Liu, Joseph Ruan, and Zak Kingston from the CoMMA Lab at Purdue University. We have the open access paper on arXiv, a trailer video on YouTube and we're looking forward to seeing you in Vienna at ICRA!
Eric's paper on optimal SAR planning has been accepted to ICRA 2026 in Vienna, Austria. ASAR finds search patterns that minimize the expected detection time of an object given uncertainty about its location. There is an open access version of the paper on arXiv, a trailer video on YouTube, and we're really looking forward to sharing more about it at ICRA!
