SJTU Pujiang International College PhD Student Publishes First-Author Paper on Robot Target Search in IEEE T-RO

Yunpeng Lu, a 2024 doctoral student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Pujiang International College, has been accepted as first author of a paper titled 'RPT*: Global Planning with Probabilistic Terminals for Target Search in Complex Environments' in IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The work, co-authored with Carnegie Mellon University and developed at the RAP Lab, introduces RPT*, an algorithm with optimality guarantees for target search under uncertainty, and the hierarchical autonomous target search system HATS. Validated in simulation and on real robots (quadruped and wheeled), the system addresses probabilistic termination in Hamiltonian path problems, achieving significant speedups over integer programming and outperforming greedy and reinforcement learning baselines in expected path cost.