Sean Murray
Papers
6
Total Citations
201
H-Index
5
About
Sean Murray’s research sits at the intersection of robotics and computer architecture, where he has pioneered hardware acceleration for robot motion planning. His most impactful work, “Robot Motion Planning on a Chip” (87 citations), introduced a method to construct robot-specific circuitry capable of generating motion plans roughly three orders of magnitude faster than conventional software approaches. This breakthrough was achieved by building collision detection circuits directly into a probabilistic roadmap. Murray further refined this concept in “The microarchitecture of a real-time robot motion planning accelerator” (58 citations), presenting an FPGA-based prototype that experimentally confirmed the thousand-fold speedup. His later work, “A Programmable Architecture for Robot Motion Planning Acceleration” (25 citations), extended these ideas by designing a flexible, programmable architecture that accelerates both collision detection and graph search, making it adaptable to diverse robots and applications. Beyond hardware, Murray contributed to human-robot interaction standards for space exploration, co-authoring two papers (16 and 12 citations) that examined common interface elements across NASA’s space enterprise. His work has fundamentally rethought how robots plan motion, shifting from purely software solutions to specialized hardware that delivers dramatic real-time performance gains.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Robot Motion Planning on a Chip87 citations · 2016
- 2The microarchitecture of a real-time robot motion planning accelerator58 citations · 2016
- 3A Programmable Architecture for Robot Motion Planning Acceleration25 citations · 2019
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- 6Roadmap Subsampling for Changing Environments3 citations · 2020