Jean-Claude Latombe (born May 14, 1947) is a French- American

roboticist Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

and the Kumagai Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. Latombe is a researcher in robot

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is use ...

, and has authored one of the most highly cited books in the field.

Biography

Latombe received his dual-Engineering Degree in electrical engineering and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (now

Grenoble Institute of Technology The Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP) (''Institut polytechnique de Grenoble'', ''Groupe Grenoble INP'' and before INPG) is a French technological university system consisting of eight engineering and management schools. Grenoble INP ...

) in 1969 and 1970, respectively, and a

M.S. A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

in electrical engineering in 1972, with the thesis ''Design of a Computer-Aided Instruction System in Electrical Engineering''. In 1977, Latombe received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in computer science from the

University of Grenoble The Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA, French: meaning "''Grenoble Alps University''") is a public research university in Grenoble, France. Founded in 1339, it is the third largest university in France with about 60,000 students and over 3,000 resea ...

with a thesis ''Artificial Intelligence for Design Automation''. He joined the faculty of INPG in 1980, and left in 1984 to join the Industry and Technology for Machine Intelligence (ITMI), a company he co-founded in 1982. In 1987, Latombe joined Stanford University as an Associate Professor, and have since been the Professor (1992), Chairman (1997–2000), and Kumagai Professor (2001–Present) in the Department of Computer Science.

Work

Latombe is an important figure in robotic

. After Mark Overmars published the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM) in 1992, Latombe and

Lydia Kavraki Lydia E. Kavraki ( el, Λύδια Καβράκη) is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice Unive ...

independently developed the algorithm in 1994, and their joint paper with Overmars, ''Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces'', is considered one of the most influential studies in

, and has been widely cited (more than 1000 times as of 2008). More recently, Latombe has applied his knowledge in robotics to structural biology problems, and developed the PRM-based Stochastic Roadmap Simulation (SRS) to efficiently generate and analyze large collections of protein trajectories.

References

External links

Stanford University Robotics: Jean-Claude Latombe webpage

NDSU.edu: Mathematics Genealogy Project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Latombe, Jean-Claude French roboticists American roboticists 1947 births Living people Stanford University School of Engineering faculty Grenoble Institute of Technology alumni Scientists from California 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century French scientists 21st-century French scientists