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.