President Clinton took office in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the international security environment. Reacting to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the administration’s new civilian leaders at the Pentagon undertook a “Bottom-Up Review” of U.S. military requirements to set the guidelines for the administration’s $1.3trillion, five-year defense program. Despite its p...

347 Robust Path Planning in the Plane Fernando De la Rosa, Christian Laugier and Jos e N ajera Abstract|This work presents an approach to plan motion strategies for robotics tasks constrained by uncertainty in position, orientation and control. Our approach operates in a (x; y; ) con guration space and it combines two local functions: a contact-based attraction function and an exploration funct...

This paper investigates controllability of underactuated rolling systems consisting of a smooth object rolling on a moving smooth surface. Our system consists of a spherical ball which rolls on the inside of an ellipsoidal bowl. The bowl has a single translational degree of freedom not aligned with any of its principal axes. The single control input is the bowl's acceleration in this direction....

For solving complex robot tasks it is necessary to incorpo rate path planning methods that are able to operate within di erent high dimensional con guration spaces containing an unknown number of obstacles Based on Advanced A algorithm AA using expansion matrices instead of a simple expansion logic we propose a further im provement of AA enabling the capability to learn directly from sample pla...

Sulabha Brahme is active in th e participatory and sustainable development movement in India . She has a PhD. in Economics from the UniversityofPoona,/ndia . She is retired from the research fa culty of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics , where she specialized in planning and policy studies on urbani zatio n , agricultural development and rural and regional planning . U y oday's C...