Note: This page hasn't been updated since 2003.
France: At LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, Juan Cortes developed sampling-based motion planning algorithms for systems with closed kinematic chains. Included are techniques that combine the RRT with novel sampling and inverse kinematics techniques that lead to very impressive solutions. See his thesis for details, including many interesting results.
US: At the University of Southern California, Marcelo Kallman has developed some impressive algorithms for collision free control of virtual humans. These methods are based in part on RRTs. Several papers and videos appear on his web page.
Italy: A sensor-based RRT (called SRT) was developed by Giuseppe Oriolo, Marilena Vendittelli, L. Freda, and G. Troso, of the DIS Robotics Laboratory at the Universita di Roma "La Sapienza". See their web page on Robotic Exploration of Unknown Environments.
US: At MIT, RRTs have been incorporated into software systems for Mars exploration vehicles.
US: At CMU, Chris Urmson has been developing RRT-based algorithms for Mars rovers that plan navigation routes that take into acount dynamics. Experients were performed on a prototype in the Atacama desert in Chile.
France: RRT-based algorithms are used in KineoWorks, developed by Kineo CAM. Their galleries page illustrates many interesting applications.
Italy: A parallel RRT algorithm was developed multiple robot motion planning was developed by Stefano Carpin and Enrico Pagello at the University of Padua. Here is a related paper. Others are listed on Carpin's web page.
US: At MIT, RRTs have been incorporated into software systems for Mars exploration vehicles. Here is a related paper: Brian C. Williams, B.C., P. Kim, M. Hofbaur, J. How, J. Kennell, J. Loy, R. Ragno, J. Stedl and A. Walcott, Model-based Reactive Programming of Cooperative Vehicles for Mars Exploration. Int. Symp. on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space, St-Hubert, Canada, June 2001.
England: The VORTAL (Variationally Optimised RRT Algorithm) algorithm was proposed in the Ph.D. thesis of Michael J. de Smith for application to distance measurement in geography. This work was done at the University of London, University College, Department of Geography.
US: At the GRASP Lab of the U. of Pennsylvania, Jongwoo Kim and Jim Ostrowski developed and implemented RRT-based motion planning algorithms for flying a blimp. Here is a pointer to their paper.
Czech Republic: An RRT was used for navigation in Barbora, a mobile robot platform designed for competitions.
US: The ERRT (execution extended RRT) was introduced at CMU by James Bruce and Manuela Veloso. It has been used for fast navigation and response to unpredictable changes during mobile robot competitions. Here is a related paper.
Switzerland/US: An RRT-based approach to planning reaching motions for human characters in graphical animation was developed by researchers at USC, DreamWorks, and the Swiss Deferal Institute of Technology. Here is a paper: M. Kallmann, A. Aubel, T. Abaci, and D. Thalmann, Planning Collision-Free Reaching Motions for Interactive Object Manipulation and Grasping, Eurographics 2003.
Japan: RRT-based algorithms were developed and tested on H5 humanoid robots at the University of Tokyo in the laboratory of Professor H. Inoue. James Kuffner made a web page that covers this work and has related papers available.
US: In James Kuffner's Ph.D. work at Stanford, he developed RRT-based algorithms to plan motions in real time for digital actors.
Taiwan: At National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, RRTs were extended into a Reconfigurable Random Forest (RRF) for multiple-query motion planning by Tsai-Yen Li and Yang-Chuan Shie. Here is a related paper.
Germany: At the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, RRTs were used to perform motion planning on an anthropomorphic robot assistant platform. Here is a related paper.
US: Prasun Choudhury and Kevin Lynch, from Northwestern University, have developed RRT-based algorithms that compute trajectories forunderactuated mechanical systems. A paper appeared at the Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) in 2002.
Sweden: Ph.D. student Morten Strandberg of Kungl Tekniska Hogskolan is developing RRT-based planners for robot manipulators.
US: Wheelchair-Accessible Design Assistant Chuck Han and Xiaoshan Pan in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of Stanford University have developed RRT software that computes feasible paths for wheelchairs, to assess automatically whether proposed architectural plans meet required legal requirements.
Older list: (needs to be updated/reformatted)