Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) Group

Dr. Jianeng Wang 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 Ox...

Jianeng Wang has successfully defended his D.Phil. on Vision-centric State Estimation and Mapping for Visually Challenging Scenarios at @ox.ac.uk. It includes both work he did with ESP at Oxford and @mauricefallon.bsky.social in @dynamicrobots.bsky.social. ...
robotic-esp.com/news/2025_08...

ESP @ ICRA 2025 — Asymptotically Optimal Planning 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 co...

Tyler Wilson presented his work on Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*) at #ICRA2025 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 ... robotic-esp.com/news/2025_05...

Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) 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 L...

Tyler has an exciting new work that achieves orders-of-magnitude faster asymptotically optimal planning with and without hardware acceleration. This work is under review at IEEE RA-L and an early release will be presented at the RoboARCH workshop at ICRA 2025...
robotic-esp.com/news/2025_05...

YouTube video by Robotic ESP Nearest-Neighbourless Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning (Fully Connected Informed Trees, FCIT*)

Tyler's paper with Wil Thomason, Zak Kingston, and Lydia Kavraki has been accepted to @ieee-ras-icra.bsky.social 2025! It extends their exciting work on vector-accelerated motion planning to a.s.a.o planning, check it out:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb_5...
robotic-esp.com/papers/wilso...

Jianeng is presenting his work on continuous-time trajectory estimation using event cameras at ICRA in Yokohama, Japan. The paper is already published in RA-L with an open access version is available. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2024_05_12_icra24

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. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2024_02_22_latexpresents

The Estimation, Search, and Planning (ESP) research group has moved! ESP is excited to now be at Queen's in Kingston, Canada after great years at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) in Oxford, UK. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2023_11_14_queens

Rowan has developed an autonomous aerial surveying platform, Osprey, in collaboration with ESP and DRS at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI). Osprey can perform multimission autonomous surveys of completely unknown 3D structures… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2023_11_08_border_arxiv23

Jianeng has been researching the similarities between rolling-shutter cameras and/or scanning lidars and asynchronous event cameras. He has developed a visual odometry (VO) pipeline for stereo event cameras … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2023_06_06_arxiv23_wang

Rowan has done some great work trialling an autonomous aerial surveying system at the Fire Services College. This work is in collaboration with the Dynamic Robot Systems group at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI). https://youtu.be/MphGpIPniOE

Jonathan has returned from IROS 2022 where ESP released its code for evaluating motion planners at the Workshop on Evaluating Motion Planning Performance (EMPP). … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_11_01_pdt

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… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_10_20_ral22 #IROS2022

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. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_07_28_arxiv22_border

Congratulations to Marlin, whose paper on asymmetric bidirectional planning has just appeared in IJRR. You can watch a short trailer video of the work on YouTube and check out the open-source code. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_07_05_ijrr_strub

Jonathan has been working with Valentin Hartmann to extend Marlin's work on effort-informed planning to multiquery problems. Their Effort Informed Roadmaps (EIRM*) can solve individual problems an order-of-magnitude faster… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_05_18_arxiv22_hartmann

Congratulations to Marlin for defending his D.Phil. on Leveraging Multiple Sources of Information to Search Continuous Spaces. Many thanks to his examiners… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2022_01_06_dr_mstrub

Kevin has submitted a journal paper on Multimotion Visual Odometry (MVO) to IJRR. This is his definitive version of the work we're doing in ESP on measuring moving scenes from a dynamic camera. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2021_11_17_arxiv21_judd

Marlin has submitted a journal paper on asymmetric bidirectional planning to IJRR. We're happy to provide its algorithms, Adaptively Informed Trees (AIT*) and Effort Informed Trees (EIT*), as open-source OMPL code. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2021_11_04_arxiv21b_strub

Marlin has been working on planning problems that seek to optimize the distance between paths and obstacles. This is a difficult problem for informed search algorithms… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2021_04_07_arxiv21_strub

Marlin's paper at IROS 2020 with the NASA JPL Robotic Surface Mobility Group on tethered-rover autonomy was a finalist for the Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2020_11_02_iros20_paton

Another ESP paper at virtual IROS is Rowan's latest work on NBV planning for autonomous 3D reconstruction. It presents an updated Surface Edge Explorer (SEE++) algorithm… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2020_10_21_iros20_border

ESP has three papers at IROS this year, which is being held virtually as an on-demand conference. All our work is already available and includes Kevin's most recent paper on occlusion-robust Multimotion Visual Odometry (MVO). … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2020_10_13_iros20_judd

Jonathan was invited to survey the popular field of asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planning algorithms in the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. … https://robotic-esp.com/news/2020_09_22_arcras

Rowan has a great new paper on how to estimate occlusions and view coverage in density-based next best view (NBV) algorithms at IROS 2020. The full paper is already available on arXiv… https://robotic-esp.com/news/2020_09_13_iros20c_arxiv