16-350 Planning Techniques for Robotics

Planning is one of the core components that enable robots to be autonomous. Robot planning is responsible for deciding in real-time what the robot should do next, how to do it, where the robot should move next and how to move there. This class does an in-depth study of popular planning techniques in robotics and examines their use in ground and aerial robots, humanoids, mobile manipulation platforms and multi-robot systems. The students learn the theory of these methods and also implement them in a series of programming-based projects.

To take the class students should have a good knowledge of programming and data structures.

Spring 2026 Course Information

Announcements

1/25: The class on Monday 1/26 will be held over zoom. The link was posted on Piazza.

Dates/times

Class meetings:

Mondays, Wednesdays, 2:00-3:20PM, NSH 3002

Instructor

Who	Email
Maxim Likhachev

Teaching Assistants

Who	Email
Barath Satheeshkumar

Office Hours

Who	Location	Hours
Barath	NSH 4224	Mon 4-5PM and Thu 12-1PM
Maxim	NSH 3211	By appointment

Grading

The criteria used to compute the final grade will consist of a combination of scores obtained on the exam, three programming assignments (homeworks), pop quizzes, final project and class participation:

Three homeworks	33%
Exam	20%
In-class pop quizzes	10%
Final project	32%
Participation	5%

Each student has a total of 3 free late days that may be used as needed for homeworks. No late days may be used for the final project!
Additional details: A late day is defined as a 24-hour period after the deadline. After the free late days are used up, each additional late day will incur a 10% penalty on the maximum achievable score with an upper limit on the penalty of 50%. For example, if the assignment is worth 100 points and your score is 80, then your actual score will be 72 if you have 1 additional late day, 64 if you have 2 additional late days, etc.

Class lectures/notes:

Tentative schedule for the class (PDF)

Date	Topic	Slides	Homeworks	Additional Info
1/12 (Mon)	Introduction, What is Robot Planning?	slides	-	-
1/14 (Wed)	Planning Representations: Skeleton-, Grid- and Lattice-based Graphs, Explicit vs. Implicit Graphs	slides	-	-
1/19 (Mon)	MLK Day, NO CLASS	-	-	-
1/21 (Wed)	*Search Algorithms: Uninformed A Search**	slides	Robot Chasing Target Planning HW1	-
1/26 (Mon)	Search Algorithms: A* Search, Multi-goal A*	slides	-	-
1/28 (Wed)	*Search Algorithms: Heuristics, Backward A, Weighted A* Search**	slides	-	-
2/2 (Mon)	Interleaving Planning and Execution: Anytime Heuristic Search	slides	-	-
2/4 (Wed)	Interleaving Planning and Execution: Incremental Heuristic Search	slides	-	-
2/9 (Mon)	Interleaving Planning and Execution: Real-time Heuristic Search	slides	-	-
2/11 (Wed)	Case Study: Planning for Autonomous Driving	slides	-	-