Robot Motion Planning
The study of exact algorithms for robot motion planning forms a major subarea of computational geometry, with connections also to symbolic and algebraic computation. Note that motion planning is useful not only for computer control of actual robots; in his invited talk at FOCS 1995, Jean-Claude Latombe showed impressive videos of applications of the same techniques in assembly planning and to computer animation.
- Collision
detection research at UNC.
- Level set
methods for following the evolution of interfaces, J. Sethian,
Berkeley. The basic idea is to solve various "advancing front" type problems
such as finding shortest paths around obstacles, by evolving a surface
in one higher dimension that describes the dynamics of the front.
Includes movies and Java applets describing applications to
VLSI design, medical image processing, noise removal from images, and
robot motion planning.
- Localization and navigation using laser radar. This project at U. Würzburg uses visibility polygon matching to determine robot locations.
- Motion planning literature search,
J. Vleugels and P. Svestka, Utrecht.
- Robotics Resource Page, Data Recovery Labs.
- Robotics
papers and preprints, list of online papers on sensor based
planning, grasping and fixturing, locomotion, and other robotics topics,
maintained by Howie Choset, CMU.
- Twelve
open problems in industrial robotics.
- US
Patent 4862373 is an early patent on robot motion planning
algorithms, referenced by many later patents on the same subject.
- Worksh. Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics.
1st Worksh., proceedings contents and ordering info.
3rd Worksh., Houston, March 1998, program and participants.