Karen Zita Haigh

About

Karen Zita Haigh is a pioneering roboticist whose work laid the foundation for autonomous mobile robots operating in human environments. Her research centers on integrated planning, execution, and learning for robotic agents, with a particular focus on office delivery robots and multi-robot coordination. Her landmark 1997 paper, "A layered architecture for office delivery robots," has accumulated 196 citations and introduced a groundbreaking approach to task ordering, path planning, and obstacle avoidance that became a blueprint for reliable autonomous systems. Haigh's work on the Xavier robot system (66 citations) demonstrated how robots could handle complex, real-world tasks like mail delivery and library book returns while managing asynchronous user requests. Her 2002 paper on coordinated deployment of multiple heterogeneous robots (70 citations) addressed the critical challenge of robot interference and sensory overload in multi-agent systems. She also developed MACBeth, a constraint-based tactical planning engine for multi-agent teams, and created the Rogue robotic agent that interleaved planning with execution while learning situation-dependent costs. Her contributions remain highly influential in robotics, particularly for their emphasis on reliability, efficiency, and practical deployment in dynamic environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A layered architecture for office delivery robots

   196 citations · 1997
2. 2
   Coordinated deployment of multiple, heterogeneous robots

   70 citations · 2002
3. 3
   Xavier

   66 citations · 1997
4. 4
   Interleaving Planning and Robot Execution for Asynchronous User Requests

   57 citations · 1998
5. 5
   Interleaving Planning and Robot Execution for Asynchronous User Requests

   53 citations · 1998
6. 6
   Planning, execution and learning in a robotic agent

   48 citations · 1998
7. 7
   High-level planning and low-level execution

   38 citations · 1997
8. 8
   MACBeth: A Multi-Agent Constraint-Based Planner

   28 citations · 2000
9. 9
   Learning situation-dependent costs

   18 citations · 1998
10. 10
    Situation-dependent learning for interleaved planning and robot execution

    18 citations · 1998

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links