This paper presents VEX-CMS, a tool to build 3D virtual museums and exhibitions, architectural walkthroughs and, more generally, applications where 3D and 2D content is presented to the user inside a 3D Virtual Environment. In this paper, we concentrate on the task of designing tours of the virtual environment to be followed by visitors, either through manual or automatic navigation, and show h...

Finding the 3D structure a protein will assume given only its amino acid sequence remains largely an open question in bioinformatics. New developments have incorporated 3D images–”density maps”–of molecules from electron microscopy, but this presents its own problems. We seek to measure the lengths of segments of protein polymer chains associated with specific regions of the density map. We bri...

In this article we present the complete details of the architecture and implementation of Leaving Flatland, an exploratory project that attempts to surmount the challenges of closing the loop between autonomous perception and action on challenging terrain. The proposed system includes comprehensive localization, mapping, path planning, and visualization techniques for a mobile robot to operate ...

In this paper, a new path planning method for robots used in outdoors environments is presented. The proposed method applies Fast Marching to a 3D surface represented with a triangular mesh to calculate a smooth trajectory from one point to another. The method uses a triangular mesh instead of a square mesh since this kind of grid adapts better to 3D surfaces. The novelty of this approach is th...

We describe a practical path-planning algorithm that generates smooth paths for an autonomous vehicle operating in an unknown environment, where obstacles are detected online by the robot’s sensors. This work was motivated by and experimentally validated in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where robotic vehicles had to autonomously navigate parking lots. Our approach has two main steps. The firs...

We describe a practical path-planning algorithm for an autonomous vehicle operating in an unknown semi-structured (or unstructured) environment, where obstacles are detected online by the robot’s sensors. This work was motivated by and experimentally validated in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where robotic vehicles had to autonomously navigate parking lots. The core of our approach to path pl...

the large amount of computation necessary for obtaining time optimal solution for moving a manipulator on specified path has made it impossible to introduce an on line time optimal control algorithm. most of this computational burden is due to calculation of switching points. in this paper a learning algorithm is proposed for finding the switching points. the method, which can be used for both ...

Grids with blocked and unblocked cells are often used to represent continuous 2D and 3D environments in robotics and video games. The shortest paths formed by the edges of 8neighbor 2D grids can be up to ≈ 8% longer than the shortest paths in the continuous environment. Theta* typically finds much shorter paths than that by propagating information along graph edges (to achieve short runtimes) w...