Computational Geometry Seminar

"The Curvature-Velocity Method for Local Obstacle Avoidance", by Reid Simmons.
We present a new method for local obstacle avoidance by indoor mobile robots that formulates the problem as one of constrained optimization in velocity-space. Constraints that stem from physical limitations (velocities and accelerations) and the environment (obstacles) are placed on the translational and rotational velocities of the robot. The robot chooses velocity commands that satisfy all the constraints and maximize an objective function that trades off speed, safety and goal-directedness.

"Competitive Robot Mapping with Homogeneous Markers", by Xiaotie Deng and Andranik Mirzaian.
We consider the robot exploration problem of graph maps with homogeneous markers. The environment is a graph consisting of nodes and edges, where the robot can navigate from one node to another through an edge connecting these two nodes. However, the robot may not distinguish one node (or edge) from another in this unknown graph. To assists the robot's task of mapping the environment, it can put homogeneous marks on nodes or edges.