Jean-Claude Latombe (born May 14, 1947) is a French-American roboticist and the Kumagai Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
Latombe is a researcher in robot motion planning, and has authored one of the most highly cited books in the field.
In 1977, Latombe received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Grenoble with a thesis Artificial Intelligence for Design Automation.
After Mark Overmars published the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM) in 1992, Latombe and Lydia Kavraki independently developed the algorithm in 1994, and their joint paper with Overmars, Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces,[3] is considered one of the most influential studies in motion planning, and has been widely cited (more than 1000 times as of 2008).
More recently, Latombe has applied his knowledge in robotics to structural biology problems, and developed the PRM-based Stochastic Roadmap Simulation (SRS) to efficiently generate and analyze large collections of protein trajectories.