Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Intelligent CAD to Crowd Simulation to Protein Folding

Motion planning has application in many domains such as robotics, animation, virtual prototyping and training, and even protein folding and drug design. Surprisingly, sampling-based planning methods have proven effective on problems from all these domains. In this talk, we describe sampling-based planning and give an overview of some variants developed in our group. We describe in more detail our work related to virtual prototyping, crowd simulation, and protein folding. For virtual prototyping, we show that in some cases a hybrid system incorporating both an automatic planner and haptic user input leads to superior results. For crowd simulation, we describe techniques for evacuation planning and for evaluating architectural designs. Finally, we describe our application of sampling-based motion planners to simulate molecular motions, such as protein and RNA folding.

Speaker: Nancy Amato, Texas A&M University