Helen Oleynikova
Papers
20
Total Citations
1,844
H-Index
14
About
Helen Oleynikova is a robotics researcher whose work spans autonomous exploration, motion planning, and human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on enabling aerial robots to operate safely and intelligently in unknown environments. She is perhaps best known for her highly influential 2016 paper introducing the Receding Horizon "Next-Best-View" Planner, a landmark contribution to autonomous 3D exploration that has garnered over 600 citations and become a foundational reference in robotic path planning. Her concurrent work on continuous-time trajectory optimization for UAV replanning — cited over 370 times across related publications — demonstrated practical methods for real-time collision avoidance in unstructured spaces. Oleynikova has also made significant contributions to map representation, advocating for signed distance fields as a unified framework for both mapping and planning. Her later research expanded into parallel GPU-based motion generation for robotic manipulators with CuRobo, and into mixed reality interfaces that bring spatial computing and robotics together for more intuitive human-robot interaction. Spanning embedded hardware, aerial autonomy, and manipulation, her body of work reflects a rare breadth, consistently bridging theoretical rigor with real-world robotic deployment.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Receding Horizon "Next-Best-View" Planner for 3D Exploration601 citations · 2016
- 2Receding horizon path planning for 3D exploration and surface inspection257 citations · 2016
- 3Continuous-time trajectory optimization for online UAV replanning247 citations · 2016
- 4Continuous-time trajectory optimization for online UAV replanning131 citations · 2016
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- 6CuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Robot Motion Generation82 citations · 2023
- 7
- 8
- 9Sparse 3D Topological Graphs for Micro-Aerial Vehicle Planning70 citations · 2018
- 10