OBJECTIVES When a soccer stadium stampede occurred in Zimbabwe on 9 July 2000, the hospital disaster (medical emergency) plan failed. This report describes the use of the audit technique to change the hospital's disaster preparedness. METHOD A literature review was done to establish international standards of best practice in major medical incident response. The hospital disaster plan (major ...

In this paper we will address the problem of planning optimal grasps. Two general optimality criteria, that consider the total finger force and the maximum finger force will be introduced and discussed. Moreover their formalization, using various metrics on a space of generalized forces, will be detailed. The geometric interpretation of the two criteria will lead to an efficient planning algori...

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts the scien-tiic operations of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This paper describes several innovative systems which have been developed to support science operations, including proposal selection, planning and scheduling. The application of these techniques to other observatories and spacecraft is discussed as well.

We propose a randomized STRIPS planning algorithm called RRT-Plan. This planner is inspired by the idea of Rapidly exploring Random Trees, a concept originally designed for use in continuous path planning problems. Issues that arise in the conversion of RRTs from continuous to discrete spaces are discussed, and several additional mechanisms are proposed to improve performance. Our experimental ...

Abstrct-A simple and efficient algorithm is presented, using configuration space, to plan collision-free motions for general manipulators. An implementation of the algorithm for manipulators made up of revolute joints is also presented. The configuration-space obstacles for an n degree-of-freedom manipulator are approximated by sets of n 1dimensional slices, recursively built up from one-...

This paper summarizes the main existing approaches to propagate resource constraints in Constraint-Based scheduling and identifies some of their limitations for using them in an integrated planning and scheduling framework. We then describe two new algorithms to propagate resource constraints on discrete resources and reservoirs. Unlike most of the classical work in scheduling, our algorithms f...

A disciplined design process does not guarantee a complete and flawless model of a planning problem, even with the existing methods and tools available in the AI community. A post-design project phase can identify essential hidden knowledge and directly impact the final planning system. The central theme of this paper is the design of a domain-independent framework to structure the post-design ...

During the past several years, AI planning has made major steps forward in terms of the size and difficulty of problems that can be solved. In this article we give an overview of the techniques that have been part of the recent developments. Instead of concentrating on individual planning systems, we review the underlying principles behind many of the successful planners.

This paper presents the design of a novel robot capable of climbing on vertical and rough surfaces, such as stucco walls. Termed CLIBO (claw inspired robot), the robot can remain in position for a long period of time. Such a capability offers important civilian and military advantages such as surveillance, observation, search and rescue and even for entertainment and games. The robot's kinemati...

We introduce the notion of expansiveness to characterize a family of robot conngu-ration spaces whose connectivity can be eeectively captured by a roadmap of randomly-sampled milestones. The analysis of expansive connguration spaces has inspired us to develop a new randomized planning algorithm. This new algorithm tries to sample only the portion of the connguration space that is relevant to th...