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About

Qifan Xue is a robotics and autonomous systems researcher whose career spans several decades, with enduring contributions to the fields of multi-robot coordination, path planning, and, more recently, trajectory forecasting for intelligent vehicles. Beginning in the early 1990s, Xue pioneered foundational work on collision-free path planning for cooperating robot manipulators, investigating how two planar robots could collaboratively transport objects through obstacle-filled environments — research that helped establish configuration space modeling as a practical tool for multi-robot systems. His 1993 paper on joint space graph construction for cooperating manipulators (11 citations) and his 1992 study on closed-chain path planning in unknown environments (10 citations) remain key references in the field. Xue extended this work into three-dimensional workspaces in 1995 and to mobile robot coordination in 2003, formalizing path planning as a minimax optimization problem. Demonstrating remarkable research longevity, his 2021 contribution on the Hierarchical Motion Encoder-Decoder Network for trajectory forecasting reflects a compelling pivot toward deep learning applications in intelligent transportation and social robotics, underscoring his ability to evolve alongside rapidly advancing technologies.