Jekyll2026-03-11T16:31:48-04:00https://robotic-esp.com/feed.xmlEstimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) Research GroupThe Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group is part of the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University.ESP @ ICRA 2026 — Real-time incremental planning2026-03-05T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/icra26_sabbadini 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!

]]>ICRA 2026: ASAR — Minimum Expected-detection-time Paths for Search and Rescue (SAR)2026-03-03T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/icra26_mugford 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!

]]>RA-L: Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC)2025-12-08T00:00:00-05:002025-12-08T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/ral25 Tyler's paper on asymptotically optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) has been published in RA-L. We'll be presenting it with Wil Thomason and Zak Kingston (CoMMA Lab, Purdue University) at ICRA 2026 and are looking forward to seeing everyone in Vienna in June 2026. The paper is already up on on arXiv with an associated video on YouTube and the algorithm available in both VAMP and OMPL.]]>Dr. Jianeng Wang2025-08-05T00:00:00-04:002025-08-05T00:00:00-04:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/dr_jwang Jianeng has successfully defended his D.Phil. on Vision-centric State Estimation and Mapping for Visually Challenging Scenarios at the University of Oxford. It includes both work he did with ESP at Oxford and Prof. Maurice Fallon in the Dynamic Robot Systems Group. Jianeng started his degree during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic and persevered through a lot of challenges outside his control, so it's a great pleasure to say: Congratulations, Dr. Wang!

]]>ESP @ ICRA 2025 — Asymptotically Optimal Planning2025-05-25T00:00:00-04:002025-05-25T00:00:00-04:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/icra25 Tyler Wilson presented his work on Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*) at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. You can already read the paper on arXiv, watch a short video on YouTube, and checkout the code yourself.

While there, Tyler also presented an early preview of our recent RA-L submission on asymptotically optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC), which you can read more about here.

]]>Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC)2025-05-18T00:00:00-04:002025-05-18T00:00:00-04:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/arxiv25_wilson Tyler has an exciting new work that achieves orders-of-magnitude faster asymptotically optimal planning with and without hardware acceleration. This work is with Wil Thomason and Zak Kingston (CoMMA Lab, Purdue University) and is under review at RA-L and an early release will be presented at the RoboARCH workshop at ICRA 2025. You can can watch the video on YouTube, read the paper on arXiv, and checkout both the VAMP and OMPL code.

]]>Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*)2024-12-05T00:00:00-05:002024-12-05T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/arxiv24_wilson Tyler and Jonathan have been working with Wil Thomason (The AI Institute), Zak Kingston (CoMMA Lab, Purdue University), and Lydia Kavraki (Kavraki Lab, Rice University) on extending their exciting work on vector accelerated motion planning (VAMP). Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*) uses SIMD instructions to achieve real-time almost-surely asymptotically optimal planning and has been submitted to ICRA 2025. If you'd like to know more you can watch the trailer video on YouTube, read the paper on arXiv, and checkout the code.

]]>ESP @ ICRA 2024 — Continuous-time Visual Odometry with Event Cameras2024-05-12T00:00:00-04:002024-05-12T00:00:00-04:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/icra24 Jianeng is presenting his work on continuous-time trajectory estimation using event cameras at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan. The paper is already published in RA-L with an open access version available. You can watch his presentation on YouTube and if you're in Yokohama for ICRA, come say hello and talk event-based state estimation!

]]>LaTeX Presents2024-02-22T00:00:00-05:002024-02-22T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/latexpresents We do a lot of presentations on our work in the Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group, so we've developed our own presentation tool to make them better. LaTeX Presents builds on LaTeX and Beamer to quickly and easily make academic presentations with lots of images and videos. If that sounds interesting to you, check out a very simple demonstration or try the code yourself.

]]>Canadian ESP2023-11-14T00:00:00-05:002023-11-14T00:00:00-05:00https://robotic-esp.com/news/queens The Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group has moved! ESP is excited to now be at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada after great years at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) in Oxford, UK. We're going to be continuing our knowledge-based approach to robotics research as part of the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in Smith Engineering.

]]>