Erion Plaku

About

Erion Plaku is a robotics and computer science researcher whose work spans motion planning, hybrid systems verification, and robot perception. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering contributions to kinodynamic motion planning, most notably the Discrete Search Leading Continuous Exploration (DSLX) planner, which elegantly combines workspace decomposition with continuous exploration to tackle complex planning problems (73 citations). His influential work on integrating temporal logic specifications with motion planning has helped define a growing subfield, bridging discrete task reasoning and continuous robot motion—a contribution that has garnered significant scholarly attention (92 citations) and remains highly relevant across navigation, search-and-rescue, and surgical robotics applications. Plaku has also made notable strides in hybrid systems falsification, developing methods to detect violations of Linear Temporal Logic safety properties by pairing motion planning with discrete search (collectively exceeding 160 citations across related works). His research in tactile object recognition, which merges haptic exploration with appearance-based identification, reflects his broader interest in robot perception (144 citations). Additionally, his early work on probabilistic roadmap planning and distributed k-nearest-neighbor graph computation demonstrates a consistent commitment to scalable, practical algorithmic solutions. Across more than a decade of research, Plaku's contributions have meaningfully advanced autonomous robot intelligence.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Tactile-Object Recognition From Appearance Information

   144 citations · 2011
2. 2
   Motion generation of robotic surgical tasks: Learning from expert demonstrations

   97 citations · 2010
3. 3
   Motion planning with temporal-logic specifications: Progress and challenges

   92 citations · 2015
4. 4
   Discrete Search Leading Continuous Exploration for Kinodynamic Motion Planning

   73 citations · 2007
5. 5
   Hybrid systems: from verification to falsification by combining motion planning and discrete search

   60 citations · 2008
6. 6
   Falsification of LTL Safety Properties in Hybrid Systems

   54 citations · 2009
7. 7
   Falsification of LTL safety properties in hybrid systems

   51 citations · 2012
8. 8
   Multiple query probabilistic roadmap planning using single query planning primitives

   50 citations · 2004
9. 9
   Distributed computation of the knn graph for large high-dimensional point sets

   46 citations · 2006
10. 10
    Planning in Discrete and Continuous Spaces: From LTL Tasks to Robot Motions

    45 citations · 2012

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links