Diederik Verscheure

About

Diederik Verscheure is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of optimal motion planning, convex optimization, and contact dynamics. He is best known for his landmark 2009 paper, "Time-Optimal Path Tracking for Robots: A Convex Optimization Approach," which has garnered over 538 citations and stands as a foundational contribution to robot trajectory planning. By employing a nonlinear change of variables, Verscheure demonstrated how time-optimal path tracking problems — notoriously difficult nonlinear challenges — can be elegantly transformed into tractable convex optimal control problems, enabling efficient and globally optimal solutions. Beyond this seminal work, Verscheure extended these ideas to time-energy optimization and developed online, real-time variants using log-barrier methods, broadening the practical applicability of his framework. A second major thread of his research addresses contact dynamics identification, where he investigated methods for experimentally determining contact parameters in stiff, multi-point robotic interactions — work critical for improving the fidelity of robot simulation and autonomous operation in unstructured environments. These contributions were unified in his 2009 doctoral dissertation. Verscheure's research has had lasting influence on both academic robotics and industrial automation, providing engineers and researchers with computationally efficient tools for pushing robots to their physical performance limits.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Time-Optimal Path Tracking for Robots: A Convex Optimization Approach

   538 citations · 2009
2. 2
   Time-energy optimal path tracking for robots: a numerically efficient optimization approach

   73 citations · 2008
3. 3
   On-line time-optimal path tracking for robots

   31 citations · 2009
4. 4
   Identification of Contact Dynamics Parameters for Stiff Robotic Payloads

   29 citations · 2009
5. 5
   Practical Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Robots: a Convex Optimization Approach

   29 citations · 2008
6. 6
   Identification of Contact Parameters from Stiff Multi-point Contact Robotic Operations

   20 citations · 2009
7. 7
   On-line identification of contact dynamics in the presence of geometric uncertainties

   18 citations · 2008
8. 8
   Recursive log-barrier method for on-line time-optimal robot path tracking

   17 citations · 2009
9. 9
   Contributions to Contact Modeling and Identification and Optimal Robot Motion Planning (Bijdragen tot modellering en identificatie van contact en optimale bewegingsplanning voor robots)

   2 citations · 2009

Key Collaborators

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