Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)


Motion Planning for Physical Systems

Lydia Kavraki
Department of Computer Science
Rice University

June 3, 2007, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

Over the last decade, motion planning algorithms have been used to solve complex geometric problems and have contributed to advances in industrial automation, computer-assisted design, autonomous exploration with vehicles but also in diverse fields such as animation and computational structural biology. This talk will discuss recent work that has led to a novel algorithm that seamlessly combines geometry and physics and can plan for wide range of robot systems with complex dynamics. The geometry aspect of the problem is addressed with a combination of sampling, subdivision and dimension reduction methods. The implementation uses a general purpose physical simulator to model contact, friction and arbitrary kinematic constraints. Some theoretical aspects of the planner will be presented as well as extensions to planning in dynamic environments and planning for hybrid systems. The talk will conclude by discussing the implications of this work to robotics, graphics, artificial intelligence, computational structural biology, and more generally, our capability to compute in the physical world.

About the Speaker

Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. She also holds joint appointments at the Department of Bioengineering at Rice and the Department of Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at Baylor College of Medicine. Kavraki received her B.A. degree in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research is in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics and structural bioinformatics. Kavraki is a co-author of a recent robotics textbook titled "Principles of Robot Motion". Her awards include the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. See http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki for more details.


Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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