Oussama Khatib

Oussama Khatib (born 1950 in Aleppo, Syria) is a roboticist and professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Robotics Laboratory. He pioneered the artificial potential field method for robot motion planning, an approach that treats obstacles as generating repulsive forces to guide a robot's path, and developed the operational space formulation, which allows a robot to be controlled directly in the space of its task rather than joint by joint. His laboratory's research spans macro mini robots, cooperative robot systems, humanoid robotics, and haptic interaction and rendering for virtual environments. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, has served as president of the International Foundation for Robotics Research, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for contributions to robotic systems operating in complex environments.