Abstract
Aimée Vargas E., "Visualization Tools for Moving Objects," Masters Thesis, Parasol Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, Dec 2005.
Masters Thesis(ps, pdf, abstract)
In this work we describe the design and implementation of a general
framework for visualizing and editing motion planning environments,
problem instances, and their solutions.
The motion planning problem consists of finding a valid path between a
start and a goal configuration for a movable object. The workspace is,
in traditional robotics and animation applications, composed of one or
more objects (called obstacles) that cannot overlap with the robot.
As even the simplest motion planning problems have been shown to be
intractable, most practical approaches to motion planning use
randomization and/or compute approximate solutions. While the tool we
present allows the manipulation and evaluation of planner solutions
and the animation of any path found by any planner, it is specialized
for a class of randomized planners called probabilistic roadmap
methods (PRMs).
PRMs are roadmap-based methods that generate a graph or roadmap where
the nodes represent collision-free configurations and the edges
represent feasible paths between those configurations. PRMs typically
consist of two phases: roadmap construction, where a roadmap is built,
and query, where the start and goal configurations are connected to
the roadmap and then a path is extracted using graph search
techniques.