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

Outline of this Newsletter

Newsletter October 2008

Dear Committee Members,

In this newsletter:

  1. We have some new volunteers to help the steering committee with various tasks:
    • Newsletters: Thierry Fraichard, Jyh-Ming Lien, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Pekka Isto, Young Kim, Marco Morales, Jur van den Berg, Roland Philippsen, Reza Iraji, Calin Belta, Erion Plakau.
    • Research Repository: Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Huifang Elizabeth Wang
    • Research Paper Repository: Kostas Bekris
    • Course Repository: Huifang Elizabeth Wang
  2. The Path Planning on Costmaps Workshop at ICRA 2008, Pasadena, was organized by Wes Huang (Applied Perception) and Dave Ferguson (Intel Research). Several researchers presented appoaches for dealing with a continuum of terrain cost (instead of discrete obstacles), where these terrain costs change over the course of a run, the environment is only partially-known, and the path planner must run repeatedly and in real-time. There was an open and productive exchange of lessons learned from using costmap planning on real systems.
  3. The workshop on Topology and Minimalism in Robotics and Sensor Networks at RSS 2008, Zürich, was organized by Robert Ghrist (Illinois Urbana Champaign), Steve LaValle (Illinois Urbana Champaign), and George J. Pappas (Pennsylvania). The workshop explored the theme of achieving well-specified robotic and sensor network tasks with as little information as possible, rather than trying to learn and utilize precise and complete models, motivated by the idea that minimalism offers greater robustness and simplicity.
  4. The tutorial on Fast Marching Method: Theoretical Underpinnings and Applications to Robotics at IROS 2008, Nice, was organized by Yi Li, Moslem Kazemi, and Kamal Gupta (Simon Fraser University). The theoretical and numerical underpinnings of the Fast Marching Method were introduced to roboticists, and some existing applications were presented. Open questions and possible extensions were discussed as well, turning the tutorial into a captivating workshop.
  5. The tutorial on Motion planning with the OOPSMP toolkit at IROS 2008, Nice, was organized by the Kavraki Lab (Rice). OOPSMP, previously announced in our February 2008 newsletter, is an Object-Oriented Programming System for Motion Planning. Slides, movies, and example code from the tutorial are available from the tutorial web site.