respected the human rights of its citizens in many areas,’’ but that ‘‘serious problems remain, including independence and freedom of the media. . . .’’ The report goes on to state ‘‘Federal, regional, and local governments continued to exert pressure on journalists by: initiating investigations by the federal tax police, FSB, and MVD of media companies such as independent Media-Most. . . .’’ T...

In interactive human-robot path-planning, a capability for expressing the path topology provides a natural mechanism for describing task requirements. We propose a topology-aware RRT* algorithm that can explore in parallel any given set of topologies. The topological information used by the algorithm can either be assigned by the human prior to the planning or be selected from the human in post...

Traditional path-planning involves (1) choosing start and goal points, (2) calculating a path, and (3) following that path. There are, however, many real world scenarios where an agent might need to change its goal and replan, which frequently includes expensively calculating a new path from scratch. We propose an adaptation to RRT* that locally rewires the RRT* tree as the robot moves and path...