WAFR'98: Program


Thursday, March 5


08:30 Breakfast
09:00 Opening remarks
Session Chair: Karl-Friedrich Böhringer
09:15 Invited Talk: Bruce Donald, Dartmouth
Algorithmic MEMS
10:05 Universal Part Manipulation in the Plane with a Single Horizontally-Vibrating Plate
Dan Reznik and John Canny
10:30 Velocity Field Design for Parcel Positioning and Orientation on the Virtual Vehicle, a Discrete Distributed Actuator Array
Jonathan Luntz, Bill Messner, and Howie Choset
10:55 Coffee break
Session Chair: Pankaj K. Agarwal
11:25 The Complexity of the Two Dimensional Curvature-Constrained Shortest-Path Problem
John Reif and Hongyan Wang
11:50 Approximation and Decision Algorithms for Curvature-Constrained Path Planning: A State-Space Approach
Jürgen Sellen
12:15 Elastic bands for nonholonomic car-like robots: algorithms and combinatorial issues
H. Jaouni, M. Khatib, and J.-P. Laumond
12:40 Lunch
Session Chair: Jeff Trinkle
02:30 Invited Talk: Richard Murray, Caltech
Trajectory Generation for Underactuated Mechanical Systems with Applications to Robotic Locomotion
03:20 Mechanics, Planning, and Control for Tapping
Wesley H. Huang and Matthew T. Mason
03:45 Coffee break
Session Chair: Matt Mason
04:15 Planning for In-Hand Dextrous Manipulation
Moez Cherif and Kamal K. Gupta
04:40 Shape Recovery from Passive Locally Dense Tactile Data
Michael Erdmann
07:00 Dinner

Friday, March 6

08:30 Breakfast
Session Chair: Jean-Paul Laumond
09:00 Invited Talk: John Craig, Adept
Geometric Algorithms in AdeptRAPID
09:50 On Finding Narrow Passages with Probabilistic Roadmap Planners
David Hsu, Lydia E. Kavraki, Jean-Claude Latombe, Rajeev Motwani, and Stephen Sorkin
10:15 OBPRM: An Obstacle-Based PRM for 3D Workspaces
Nancy M. Amato, O. Burchan Bayazit, Lucia K. Dale, Christopher Jones and Daniel Vallejo
10:40 Coffee break
Session Chair: Jean Ponce
11:10 Invited Talk: Joe Warren, Rice University
Subdivision: A Fractal-based Approach to Geometric Modeling
12:00 Spherical Shells: A Higher Order Bounding Volume for Fast Proximity Queries
S. Krishnan, A. Pattekar, M. Lin, and D. Manocha
12:25 Lunch
Session Chair: Mark H. Overmars
02:15 Invited Talk: Leonidas Guibas, Stanford University
Data Structures for Mobile Data
03:05 The Polygon Exploration Problem: A New Strategy and a New Analysis Technique
Frank Hoffmann, Christian Icking, Rolf Klein, and Klaus Kriegel
03:30 Coffee break
Session Chair: Daniela Rus
04:00 The Computational Power of Frictional Mechanical Systems
John Reif and Zheng Sun
04:25 Issues in Nonprehensile Manipulation
Kevin M. Lynch
04:50 Local Observability of Rolling
Yan-Bin Jia and Michael Erdmann

Saturday, March 7

08:30 Breakfast
Session Chair: John Canny
09:00 Invited Talk: Herbert Edelsbrunner, University of Illinois
Geometry for Modeling Biomolecules
09:50 Algorithms for Fence Design
Robert Paul Berretty, Mark H. Overmars, and A. Frank van der Stappen
10:15 Shape Tolerance in Feeding and Fixturing
Jingliang Chen, Ken Goldberg, Mark H. Overmars, Dan Halperin, Karl F. Böhringer, and Yan Zhuang
10:40 Coffee break
Session Chair: Jean-Claude Latombe
11:10 Towards Planning for Elastic Objects
Lydia E. Kavraki, Florent Lamiraux, and Christopher Holleman
11:35 Models and Algorithms for the Collision of Rigid and Deformable Bodies
A. Joukhadar, A. Deguet and C. Laugier
12:00 Numerical Computation of Optimal Navigation Functions on a Simplicial Complex
Steven M. LaValle
12:25 Lunch
Session Chair: Matt Mason
02:15 Invited Talk: Jocelyne Troccaz, Grenoble
Synergistic robots for surgery: the algorithmic view of this approach
03:05 Fourier Methods on Groups: Applications in Robot Kinematics and Motion Planning
A.B. Kyatkin and G.S. Chirikjian
03:30 The Self-reconfiguring Robotic Molecule
Keith Kotay, Daniela Rus, Marsette Vona, Craig McGray
03:55 Closing Remarks
04:15 Barbecue Party (Sponsored by CITI, The Computer and Information Technology Institute at Rice.)