Randomized Path Planning
Another field in which randomized algorithms have been particularly useful is robot motion and path planning. Here at Stanford there has been a significant amount of research into path planning algorithms that are based around the use of a randomized algorithm. The Randomized Path Planner (RPP), created by Jerome Barraquand and Jean-Claude Latombe, was developed to solve path finding problems in multidimensional environments. "Experiments with various kinds of robots have been conducted, and the results show that, in most cases, this planner is very efficient in finding a path, if there exists one, in high dimensional configuration space" (http://robotics.stanford.edu/users/tli/rpp3d.html). By integrating randomization, researchers have been able to develop more efficient algorithms in the path planning field of robotics.