Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

Consider a set of S of n data points in real d-dimensional space, Rd, where distances are measured using any Minkowski metric. In nearest neighbor searching, we preprocess S into a data structure, so that given any query point q∈ Rd, is the closest point of S to q can be reported quickly. Given any positive real ϵ, data point p is a (1 +ϵ)-approximate nearest neighbor of q if its distance from q is within a factor of (1 + ϵ) of the distance to the true nearest neighbor. We show that it is possible to preprocess a set of n points in Rd in O(dn log n) time and O(dn) space, so that given a query point q ∈ Rd, and ϵ > 0, a (1 + ϵ)-approximate nearest neighbor of q can be computed in O(cd, ϵ log n) time, where cd,ϵ≤d ⌈1 + 6d/ϵ⌉d is a factor depending only on dimension and ϵ. In general, we show that given an integer k ≥ 1, (1 + ϵ)-approximations to the k nearest neighbors of q can be computed in additional O(kd log n) time.

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An optimal algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor searching fixed dimensions

There is a growing need to be able to accurately and efficiently search visual data sets, and in particular, 3D shape data sets. This paper proposes a novel technique, called Topology Matching, in which similarity between polyhedral models is quickly, accurately, and automatically calculated by comparing Multiresolutional Reeb Graphs (MRGs). The MRG thus operates well as a search key for 3D shape data sets. In particular, the MRG represents the skeletal and topological structure of a 3D shape at various levels of resolution. The MRG is constructed using a continuous function on the 3D shape, which may preferably be a function of geodesic distance because this function is invariant to translation and rotation and is also robust against changes in connectivities caused by a mesh simplification or subdivision. The similarity calculation between 3D shapes is processed using a coarse-to-fine strategy while preserving the consistency of the graph structures, which results in establishing a correspondence between the parts of objects. The similarity calculation is fast and efficient because it is not necessary to determine the particular pose of a 3D shape, such as a rotation, in advance. Topology Matching is particularly useful for interactively searching for a 3D object because the results of the search fit human intuition well.

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Topology matching for fully automatic similarity estimation of 3D shapes

Search operations in databases require special support at the physical level. This is true for conventional databases as well as spatial databases, where typical search operations include the point query (find all objects that contain a given search point) and the region query (find all objects that overlap a given search region). More than ten years of spatial database research have resulted in a great variety of multidimensional access methods to support such operations. We give an overview of that work. After a brief survey of spatial data management in general, we first present the class of point access methods, which are used to search sets of points in two or more dimensions. The second part of the paper is devoted to spatial access methods to handle extended objects, such as rectangles or polyhedra. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and experimental results concerning the relative performance of various approaches.

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Multidimensional access methods

We consider routing problems in ad hoc wireless networks modeled as unit graphs in which nodes are points in the plane and two nodes can communicate if the distance between them is less than some fixed unit. We describe the first distributed algorithms for routing that do not require duplication of packets or memory at the nodes and yet guarantee that a packet is delivered to its destination. These algorithms can be extended to yield algorithms for broadcasting and geocasting that do not require packet duplication. A byproduct of our results is a simple distributed protocol for extracting a planar subgraph of a unit graph. We also present simulation results on the performance of our algorithms.

https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~bleong/geographic/related/bose01guaranteed.pdf

Routing with guaranteed delivery in ad hoc wireless networks

This introduction to computational geometry focuses on algorithms. Motivation is provided from the application areas as all techniques are related to particular applications in robotics, graphics, CAD/CAM, and geographic information systems. Modern insights in computational geometry are used to provide solutions that are both efficient and easy to understand and implement.

Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications

computational geometry algorithms and applications second edition. Book lovers, when you need a new book to read, find the book here. Never worry not to find what you need. Is the computational geometry algorithms and applications second edition your needed book now? That's true; you are really a good reader. This is a perfect book that comes from great author to share with you. The book offers the best experience and lesson to take, not only take, but also learn.

Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Second Edition

The query efficiency of a data structure that stores a set of objects, can normally be assessed by analysing the number of objects, pointers etc. looked at when answering a query. However, if the data structure is too big to fit in main memory, data may need to be fetched from disk. In that case, the query efficiency is easily dominated by moving the disk head to the correct locations, rather than by reading the data itself.

To reduce the number of disk accesses, once can group the data into blocks, and strive to bound the number of different blocks accessed rather than the number of individual data objects read. An R-tree is a general-purpose data structur that stores a hierarchical grouping of geometric objects into blocks. Many heuristics have been designed to determine which objects should be grouped together, but none of these heuristics could give a guarantee on the resulting worst-case query time.

We present the Priority R-tree, or PR-tree, which is the first R-tree variant that always answers a window query by accessing $O((N/B)^{1-1/d} + T/B)$ blocks, where $N$ is the number of $d$-dimensional objects stored, $B$ is the number of objects per block, and $T$ is the number of objects whose bounding boxes intersect the query window. This is provably asymptotically optimal. Experiments show that the PR-tree performs similar to the best known heuristics on real-life and relatively nicely distributed data, but outperforms them significantly on more extreme data.

The Priority R-Tree: A Practically Efficient and Worst-Case-Optimal R-Tree

The traditional worst-case analysis often fails to predict the actual behavior of the running time of geometric algorithms in practical situations. One reason is that worst-case scenarios are often very contrived and do not occur in practice. To avoid this, models are needed that describe the properties that realistic inputs have, so that the analysis can take these properties into account.

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Realistic input models for geometric algorithms

In many applications it is important that one can view a scene at di erent levels of detail. A prime example is ight simulation: a high level of detail is needed when ying low, whereas a low level of detail su ces when ying high. More precisely, one would like to visualize the part of the scene that is close at a high level of detail, and the part that is far away at a low level of detail. We propose a hierarchy of detail levels for a polyhedral terrain (or, triangulated irregular network) that allows this: given a view point, it is possible to select the appropriate level of detail for each part of the terrain in such a way that the parts still t together continuously. The main advantage of our structure is that it uses the Delaunay triangulation at each level, so that triangles with very small angles are avoided. This is the rst method that uses the Delaunay triangulation and still allows to combine di erent levels into a single representation.

Mark de Berg

Papers

Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications

Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Second Edition

The Priority R-Tree: A Practically Efficient and Worst-Case-Optimal R-Tree

Realistic input models for geometric algorithms

On levels of detail in terrains