We present our ongoing design of Snakey, a tangible user interface (TUI) dedicated to the field of reservoir geosciences and engineering. Our design of Snakey emphasizes intuitive manipulation and interaction with 3D curves, common to underground well path exploration and planning. Snakey is not designed to replace the traditional CAD reservoir well path planning tools, but rather to augment th...

Image-based servo is a local control solution. Thanks to the feedback loop closed in the image space, local convergence and stability in the presence of modeling errors and noise perturbations are ensured when the error is small. The principal deficiency of this approach is that the induced (3D) trajectories are not optimal and sometimes, especially when the displacement to realize is large, th...

We illustrate an original real-time replanning scheme experimentally for humanoid robot reactive walking. Footsteps are planned as a sequence of “half-steps” that can be easily integrated with randomized planning methods such as RRT. Combined with an approximation of the volume swept by the robot legs during dynamic walking, our method is able to cope with the collision avoidance for 3D obstacl...

The graph-search algorithms developed between 60s and 80s were widely used in many fields, from robotics to video games. The A* algorithm shall be mentioned between some of the most important solutions explicitly oriented to motion-robotics, improving the logic of graph search with heuristic principles inside the loop. Nevertheless, one of the most important drawbacks of the A* algorithm reside...

We propose HRA*, a new randomized path planner for complex 3D environments. The method is a modified A* algorithm that uses a hybrid node expansion technique that combines a random exploration of the action space meeting vehicle kinematic constraints with a cost to goal metric that considers only kinematically feasible paths to the goal. The method includes also a series of heuristics to accele...

We present a simple and efficient planning algorithm for camera motions through a 3D environment. Planning a camera motion consists of two stages: finding a good viewing position for the target object and changing the camera from the current position and viewing direction to the target. In order to be useful in an interactive application, the planning algorithm has to be reasonably fast, in the...

We have developed a planner for redundant manipulators that is fast, eeective and versatile, based on the idea of treating each link of a rigid-linked robot as if it were slightly exible and under the innuenceof a potentialeld. We justify the method by exploringsome simple examples, and brieey describe the extensions to the basic method that allow it to plan paths for manipulators with revolute...

Homotopy classes of trajectories, arising due to the presence of obstacles, are defined as sets of trajectories that can be transformed into each other by gradual bending and stretching without colliding with obstacles. The problem of exploring/finding the different homotopy classes in an environment and the problem of finding least-cost paths restricted to a specific homotopy class (or not bel...

Mobile robots dedicated in security tasks should be capable of clearly perceiving their environment to competently navigate within cluttered areas, so as to accomplish their assigned mission. The paper in hand describes such an autonomous agent designed to deploy competently in hazardous environments equipped with a laser scanner sensor. During the robot’s motion, consecutive scans are obtained...

In research literature and many scientific disciplines, solution to the common problem in path planning for an autonomous robot has been extensively developed. Almost all explored techniques assume the robot has complete and detailed overview of the environment he is moving in. In addition to, many methods work over the graph representation of this environment which can be very difficult to con...