News

Colloquia

Motion Planning with Rigid and Deformable Models

Dinesh Manocha
Departments of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thursday, October 12, 2006
JEC 3117, 4:00 p.m.to 5:00 p.m.
(Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.)

Motion is ubiquitous in both the real world and synthetic environments. Representation and computation of motion is central to many disciplines that deal with modeling dynamic or kinematic systems in the biological, physical or virtua world. Besides robotics, this problem arises in interaction with objects in the virtual environment, design and assembly of electronic appliances, animation of articulated figures, manipulation of nano-structures, surgical simulation, modeling of tissues, etc. However, prior techniques are mostly limited to rigid models and are unable to handle narrow spaces.
In this talk, we give an overview of our recent work on motion planning of rigid and deformable models. First, we describe new practical algorithms for path non-existence and use them for complete motion planning of rigid models. Second, we introduce a new paradigm of physically-based motion planning, which takes into account kinematic and dynamic constraints along with non-penetration to generate a physically-realistic motion. Finally, we present new Voronoi-based algorithms to perform interactive proximity queries between deformable models and use these algorithms for motion planning of multiple robots in a complex environment. We highlight the performance of our algorithms on pipe layouts, assembly planning, cloth simulation, planning liver chemoembolization procedures, and crowd simulation.
Joint work with Russ Gayle, Naga Govindaraju, Young Kim, Shankar Krishnan, Ming C. Lin, Avneesh Sud, Gokul Varadhan and Liangjun Zhang

Bio:

Dinesh Manocha is currently the Mason Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley 1992. He received Junior Faculty Award in 1992, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and NSF Career Award in 1995, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1996, Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997, and Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievements at UNC Chapel Hill in 1998. He has also received best paper & panel awards at the ACM SuperComputing, ACM Multimedia, IEEE Visualization, ACM Solid Modeling, Pacific Graphis, IEEE VR and Eurographics Conferences. His research has been sponsored by ARO, DARPA, DOE, Ford, Honda, Intel, NSF, ONR and RDECOM. He has published more than 200 papers in leading conferences and journals on computer graphics, geometric and solid modeling, robotics, symbolic and numeric computation, virtual environments and computational geometry. He has also served as a program committee member and program chair for many leading conferences in these areas. He has also served in the editorial boards of many leading journals.

Hosted by: Barbara Cutler (x3274)