IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion

Outline of this Newsletter

Newsletter February 2008

Dear Committee Members,

In this newsletter:

  1. A steering committee was formed! Our goals are to increase membership, spread the word about great research, create a sense of a community, provide useful resources to the community, initiate workshops and organize the activities of this technical committee. From this issue, we begin to create, solicit, and edit content for four newsletters per year. If you have any idea, suggest or comments, please kindly let us know: tc-apc-steering@cs.umass.edu.
  2. 2008 IEEE Virtual Reality Workshop on VIRTUAL CITYSCAPES: Key Research Issues in Modeling Large-Scale Immersive Urban Environments will be held at Silver Legacy Resort Casino, Reno, Nevada on March 8th and 9th, 2008. One of the topics is Planning and Coordination of Multiple Agents. For more information about the workshop: http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/VR08_Cityscapes/.
  3. OOPSMP for Motion Planning (by Lydia Kavraki, http://www.kavrakilab.org.)
    The Kavraki Lab for Physical and Biological Computing at Rice University is proud to announce the official release of OOPSMP v1, an Object-Oriented Programming System for Motion Planning. OOPSMP includes the following:
    • Implementations of popular motion planners such as Probabilistic RoadMap (PRM), Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), Expansive Spaces Tree (EST), bi-directional tree planners, and others.
    • Solution of problems involving one or multiple robots where each robot can freely rotate and translate or kinodynamic constraints can be imposed that restrict the possible motions.
    • General purpose utilities and data structures such as nearest neighbors; numerical integration; SE(2), SO(3) [quaternions], SE(3); sets, maps, disjoint sets, updatable heaps, graphs; DFS, BFS, Dijsktra, A*; and others.
    • Plug-and-play - One of the most distinctive features of OOPSMP is that it allows to plug-and-play existing code or new code via XML specifications.

      This software accessible enough to be used for educational purposes - general programming classes and robotics classes. Educators interested in using this package for their classes should contact kavraki@rice.edu. It is also advanced enough to be used as a research test bed.
      OOPSMP is free for academic use, and can be downloaded from http://www.kavrakilab.org/software.
  4. Research Repository: we are constructing a new block in our wiki: Research Repository, which is constructed to collect currently valuable research topics, describe the corresponding completed and open problems, and provide existing methods and material such as references, software. The goal, invitation letter and samples can be found in the cover page of research repository. This new block is in the initial stages, we very appreciate if you are interested in contribution for adding new topics or joining the discussions or any suggestion. You are greatly welcome to email us: tc-apc-steering@cs.umass.edu.

Comments and suggestions for improvement are most welcome and appeciated!

With our best wishes for the beginning year!

Steering Committee

Wiki Instructions

Most of the pages can be edited using the password [hidden]. Please take a look at this page for some instructions on how to edit the Wiki. There is a sandbox on this page where you can try out some of the features of the Wiki Editing the Wiki is very easy and we hope that this ease will encourage you to contribute.