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

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
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1/14 (Wed) Planning Representations: Skeleton-, Grid- and Lattice-based Graphs, Explicit vs. Implicit Graphs slides
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