Jean‐Paul Laumond
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Fédérale de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, Roche (France), Roche (Switzerland), Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse
Papers
127
Total Citations
7,248
H-Index
42
About
Jean-Paul Laumond is a pioneering French roboticist whose career has fundamentally shaped the field of motion planning and nonholonomic robotics. His most influential contributions center on the mathematical foundations of movement for constrained robotic systems — particularly car-like and multibody mobile robots — where he developed exact and efficient planning algorithms that remain cornerstones of the discipline. His 1994 paper on motion planning for nonholonomic mobile robots (582 citations) and his work on trajectory stabilization that same year established rigorous frameworks for handling robots whose turning radius and kinematic constraints severely limit how they can navigate. His characterization of shortest paths for car-like robots, drawing on Dubins curves and related geometry, further cemented his reputation as a theoretician of exceptional precision. Laumond also broadened his reach into humanoid robotics, applying inverse optimal control to decode the principles underlying human locomotion and transfer them to humanoid systems — a beautifully interdisciplinary contribution cited over 400 times. His work on probabilistic roadmaps for manipulation planning demonstrates versatility across robotic domains. With a body of work accumulating thousands of citations spanning more than three decades, Laumond stands as one of the most consequential figures in both theoretical and applied robotics, bridging differential geometry, control theory, and embodied intelligence.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1A motion planner for nonholonomic mobile robots582 citations · 1994
- 2Position referencing and consistent world modeling for mobile robots554 citations · 2005
- 3From human to humanoid locomotion—an inverse optimal control approach428 citations · 2009
- 4Guidelines in nonholonomic motion planning for mobile robots321 citations · 2006
- 5Manipulation Planning with Probabilistic Roadmaps275 citations · 2004
- 6Stabilization of trajectories for systems with nonholonomic constraints269 citations · 1994
- 7Shortest paths synthesis for a car-like robot254 citations · 1996
- 8
- 9Controllability of a multibody mobile robot174 citations · 1993
- 10Shortest path synthesis for Dubins non-holonomic robot156 citations · 2002