Welcome to the Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group, a member of the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI). 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 Twitter, YouTube, and GitHub accounts.
Jonathan has returned from IROS 2022 where ESP released its code for evaluating motion planners at the Workshop on Evaluating Motion Planning Performance (EMPP). Planner Developer Tools (PDT) simplifies experimental design, calculates meaningful nonparametric statistical measures of performance, generates publication-ready figures, and much more. You can find out more about PDT in the short paper or try the code yourself.
Jonathan worked with Wil Thomason and Marlin to apply asymmetric bidirectional search to task and motion planning (TMP). Task and Motion Informed Trees (TMIT*) is an anytime TMP algorithm that finds initial solutions and then improves them as time allows. It has been published in RA-L and is being presented at IROS in Kyoto, Japan. The code is available open source and you can watch the presentation video on YouTube and read the paper on arXiv. Wil is a postdoctoral research associate in Lydia Kavraki's group at Rice University.
Rowan has submitted a journal paper on the Surface Edge Explorer (SEE) to IJRR. It not only contains all the latest advances to the open source code but also really detailed simulations and experiments. Please check out the trailer video or multimedia extensions on YouTube and the paper preprint on arXiv.
