D. Wooden

Papers

Total Citations

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About

D. Wooden is a roboticist whose research centers on vision-based navigation, mapping, and motion planning for mobile robots operating in unknown, unstructured environments. His work bridges the gap between high-level global planning and low-level reactive control, enabling robots to perceive, map, and navigate their surroundings with greater autonomy and efficiency. Wooden’s most influential contribution is a simple yet robust vision-based mapping system for outdoor robot navigation, developed as part of Georgia Tech’s team for the DARPA-sponsored Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) project. This work, cited 32 times, demonstrated that effective mapping could be achieved without complex sensors, using only monocular vision. He also introduced the concept of oriented visibility graphs, which dramatically reduces the computational complexity of path planning in real-time environments—cutting inter-polygonal edges from quadratic to linear complexity relative to the number of obstacles. This innovation, with 30 citations, enables faster, more practical planning for autonomous systems. Additionally, his work on control-driven mapping and planning (8 citations) explores how layered hybrid controllers can integrate global planning with reactive local control. Wooden’s contributions are foundational for researchers and students interested in field robotics, autonomous navigation, and efficient path planning under real-world constraints.