Rajeev Motwani

About

Rajeev Motwani made substantial contributions to computational geometry and robotics, with a particular focus on algorithmic problems involving motion planning, robot localization, and pursuit-evasion strategies in geometric environments. His research addressed fundamental challenges in how robots perceive, navigate, and reason about their surroundings. Among his most influential contributions is his work on visibility-based pursuit-evasion in polygonal environments, exploring how pursuers can strategically track an unpredictable evader — work that accumulated over 460 citations across related publications. His rigorous theoretical analysis of randomized path planning schemes provided a unifying framework for understanding probabilistic motion planners, demonstrating their applicability across diverse robotic systems and earning nearly 320 citations combined. Motwani also tackled the robot localization problem, developing geometric algorithms enabling robots to determine their position within a known environment using visibility data — a foundational challenge in autonomous navigation. Beyond robotics, his work on approximation algorithms for capacitated vehicle routing and the angular-metric traveling salesman problem demonstrated his broader interest in combinatorial optimization. His ability to bridge theoretical computer science with practical robotics applications made his research particularly impactful, and his body of work continues to serve as essential reading for students and researchers working at the intersection of algorithms and autonomous systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A VISIBILITY-BASED PURSUIT-EVASION PROBLEM

   278 citations · 1999
2. 2
   A Random Sampling Scheme for Path Planning

   276 citations · 1997
3. 3
   Visibility-based pursuit-evasion in a polygonal environment

   185 citations · 1997
4. 4
   Approximating Capacitated Routing and Delivery Problems

   109 citations · 1999
5. 5
   Randomized query processing in robot path planning

   104 citations · 1995
6. 6
   The Robot Localization Problem

   78 citations · 1997
7. 7
   Randomized Query Processing in Robot Path Planning

   75 citations · 1998
8. 8
   The Angular-Metric Traveling Salesman Problem

   72 citations · 2000
9. 9
   A Random Sampling Scheme for Path Planning

   43 citations · 1996
10. 10
    The robot localization problem in two dimensions

    39 citations · 1992

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links