Papers
39
Total Citations
2,044
H-Index
16
About
Hanna Kurniawati is a prominent robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of motion planning, probabilistic reasoning, and autonomous decision-making under uncertainty. She is best known for her foundational contributions to Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) planning, a rigorous mathematical framework that enables robots to act intelligently despite imperfect sensing and unpredictable environments. Her most celebrated work, SARSOP (2008), has accumulated over 780 citations and revolutionized POMDP planning by dramatically reducing computational costs through approximating optimally reachable belief spaces — making the framework genuinely practical for real-world robotics. She has continued advancing the field through online POMDP solvers, continuous action spaces, and long-horizon planning, with her 2022 survey on POMDPs and robotics cementing her as a leading synthesizer of the domain. Earlier in her career, Kurniawati made significant contributions to probabilistic roadmap (PRM) planning, developing innovative sampling strategies for navigating narrow passages in complex configuration spaces — challenges that had long hindered path planning research. Collectively, her body of work has garnered well over 1,700 citations, reflecting sustained influence across the robotics and AI communities. Her research provides essential tools for building autonomous robots capable of operating reliably in the messy, uncertain real world.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Narrow passage sampling for probabilistic roadmap planning173 citations · 2005
- 3An Online POMDP Solver for Uncertainty Planning in Dynamic Environment162 citations · 2016
- 4Motion planning under uncertainty for robotic tasks with long time horizons133 citations · 2010
- 5Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes and Robotics120 citations · 2022
- 6Workspace importance sampling for probabilistic roadmap planning76 citations · 2005
- 7An online and approximate solver for POMDPs with continuous action space74 citations · 2015
- 8Global motion planning under uncertain motion, sensing, and environment map72 citations · 2012
- 9
- 10Bounded Uncertainty Roadmaps for Path Planning55 citations · 2009