About

Jur van den Berg is a prominent robotics researcher whose work spans multi-agent motion planning, collision avoidance, planning under uncertainty, and robotic manipulation. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to reciprocal collision avoidance, most notably the Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle (RVO) framework and its extension to n-body scenarios, which has become a cornerstone of multi-robot and crowd simulation research, accumulating over 1,800 citations. His Hybrid Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle work further refined these methods to eliminate oscillatory behavior in decentralized robot navigation. Beyond collision avoidance, van den Berg has made significant contributions to probabilistic motion planning, introducing LQG-MP for planning under sensor and motion uncertainty, and developing belief-space optimization techniques for partially observable environments. His Kinodynamic RRT* extended asymptotically optimal planning to robots with complex dynamics. Remarkably, his research breadth extends to robotic manipulation — including a widely cited geometric approach to autonomous laundry folding — and surgical robotics, where he demonstrated superhuman performance of robotic surgical subtasks through iterative learning. With multiple papers exceeding 200 citations, van den Berg's work has had lasting, cross-disciplinary impact on autonomous systems research.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

34
H-Index
47
Papers
6,426
Total Citations
137
Avg Citations/Paper
🏆 Most Cited Paper
Reciprocal n-Body Collision Avoidance
1,811 citations · 2011
📈 Most Prolific Year: 2011 (10 Papers)
🤝 Key Collaborators: 57
🏛 Institutions: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Utah, University of California, Berkeley, North Carolina State University, Utrecht University, Google (United States)

Top Papers

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    Generalized velocity obstacles
    244 citations · 2009
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Key Collaborators

Contact & Links

Available for collaboration
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