Athanasios Krontiris

About

Athanasios Krontiris is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of motion planning, object rearrangement, and multi-agent systems. He is best known for his foundational contributions to the problem of robotic object rearrangement — the challenge of efficiently reorganizing cluttered environments — a skill critical for robots operating in real-world human spaces. His 2015 paper "Dealing with Difficult Instances of Object Rearrangement" (116 citations) established key insights into navigating the combinatorially complex configuration spaces that arise when multiple movable objects are involved. Building on this, his 2018 study on tabletop rearrangement with overhand grasps (68 citations) uncovered the deep combinatorial structure underlying this problem class, producing both hardness results and practical fast algorithms. Beyond rearrangement, Krontiris has made meaningful contributions to cloud-based automation for flexible industrial manipulation, multi-agent pathfinding, and robot formation planning in cluttered environments. His work on software architectures for composing motion and task planners reflects a commitment to extensible, generalizable robotics infrastructure. Collectively, his publications have accumulated over 360 citations, reflecting sustained influence across the robotics planning community. His research consistently bridges theoretical rigor with practical algorithmic solutions, making it valuable for both academic researchers and engineers developing autonomous robotic systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Dealing with Difficult Instances of Object Rearrangement

   116 citations · 2015
2. 2
   Complexity Results and Fast Methods for Optimal Tabletop Rearrangement with Overhand Grasps

   68 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Rearranging similar objects with a manipulator using pebble graphs

   38 citations · 2014
4. 4
   Cloud Automation: Precomputing Roadmaps for Flexible Manipulation

   34 citations · 2015
5. 5
   From Feasibility Tests to Path Planners for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

   31 citations · 2021
6. 6
   Multi-level formation roadmaps for collision-free dynamic shape changes with non-holonomic teams

   19 citations · 2012
7. 7
   High-Quality Tabletop Rearrangement with Overhand Grasps: Hardness Results and Fast Methods

   18 citations · 2017
8. 8
   PRACSYS: An Extensible Architecture for Composing Motion Controllers and Planners

   17 citations · 2012
9. 9
   An Extensible Software Architecture for Composing Motion and Task Planners

   11 citations · 2014
10. 10
    Simulating Formations of Non-holonomic Systems with Control Limits along Curvilinear Coordinates

    9 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links