Philippe Moutarlier
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tarbes
Papers
7
Total Citations
225
H-Index
5
About
Philippe Moutarlier is a pioneering figure in autonomous mobile robotics, whose work has fundamentally shaped how robots perceive, navigate, and reason about their environments. His research centers on three key pillars: incremental environment modelling, optimal path planning, and robot control architectures. Moutarlier’s most influential contribution is his 1990 paper on an experimental system for incremental environment modelling by an autonomous mobile robot, which has garnered 143 citations and laid the groundwork for real-time spatial understanding from uncertain sensor data. He extended classical results in path planning by solving the problem of finding the shortest feasible path for a car-like robot to a manifold in configuration space, a mathematically rigorous advance that remains relevant for nonholonomic systems. Moutarlier also championed the LAAS architecture for mobile robot control, arguing for its superiority in a series of papers culminating in “Around the Lab in 40 days” (2000), which sparked important discussions on how to benchmark and compare robotic architectures. His work on incremental free-space modelling from uncertain data (1993) further solidified his reputation for tackling the core challenge of building reliable world models from noisy perception. With a career spanning from foundational theory to practical system integration, Moutarlier’s contributions continue to inform modern approaches to autonomous navigation and robot software design.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Shortest Paths for a Car-like Robot to Manifolds in Configuration Space28 citations · 1996
- 3Around the Lab in 40 days ...22 citations · 2000
- 4
- 5Around the lab in 40 days [indoor robot navigation]12 citations · 2002
- 6Modelisation autonome de l'environnement par un robot mobile4 citations · 1991
- 7