H. Igarashi

Papers

Total Citations

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About

H. Igarashi is a robotics researcher whose work centers on motion planning for autonomous mobile robots. His most notable contribution, developed with co-author Ioi, is a novel approach that reformulates the complex, continuous problem of robot navigation as a discrete optimization task. In their 2002 paper, they introduced a framework that solves this optimization at each time step, using a carefully designed objective function. This function balances three critical, competing priorities: a goal term to drive the robot toward its destination, a smoothness term to ensure efficient and graceful movement, and a collision term to guarantee safe navigation around obstacles. This elegant formulation provides a computationally tractable solution for real-time path planning. While his foundational paper has accumulated 2 citations, it represents a core conceptual step in the field, demonstrating a principled method for breaking down a continuous control problem into a solvable discrete sequence. Igarashi’s work is a clear example of how mathematical optimization can be directly applied to enable intelligent, autonomous robot behavior in the physical world.