Raghav Agrawal

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Raghav Agrawal is a robotics researcher whose work challenges foundational assumptions in motion planning. His key research areas include robot path planning, obstacle representation, and computational geometry for autonomous systems. Agrawal’s major contribution lies in critically examining the "perfect obstacle assumption"—the long-held binary view that divides workspace into either perfect obstacles or perfect freespace. In his seminal 1998 paper "When is an obstacle a perfect obstacle" (2 citations), he demonstrated that this black-and-white distinction is often impractical, as real-world environments involve continuous or graded costs. By questioning this simplification, Agrawal opened the door for more nuanced, cost-aware planning algorithms that better reflect physical reality. While his citation count is modest, his conceptual work has influenced subsequent research on probabilistic roadmaps and potential field methods. Agrawal’s achievement is not in volume but in depth: he identified a core limitation in classical motion planning and provided a framework for thinking beyond binary obstacles. For students and researchers, his work serves as a reminder that foundational assumptions—even those taken for granted—deserve rigorous scrutiny.