Sitterson Hall, Lecture Room 011
Randomized Motion Planning:
From Intelligent CAD to Computer
Animation to Protein Folding
Nancy Amato
Department of
Computer Science
http://parasol-www.cs.tamu.edu/~amato/
ABSTRACT: Motion
planning arises in many application domains such as computer animation (digital
actors), mixed reality systems and intelligent CAD (virtual prototyping and
training), and even computational biology and chemistry (protein folding and
drug design). Surprisingly, a single
class of planners, called probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs), have proven
effective on problems from all these domains. Strengths of PRMs, in addition to
versatility, are simplicity and efficiency, even in high-dimensional
configuration spaces.
In
this talk, we describe the PRM framework and give an overview of several PRM
variants developed in our group. We describe
in more detail our work related to virtual prototyping, computer
animation, 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
computation animation, we describe new PRM-based techniques for planning for
deformable objects and for planning sophisticated group behaviors (flocking and
herding). We will also describe our
recent application of PRMs to protein folding, where, given the native fold, we
construct a map of the protein's potential landscape which can be used to study
protein folding kinetics. More
information regarding our work, including movies, can be found at http://parasol.tamu.edu/people/amato/
BRIEF
BIOGRAPHY: Nancy M. Amato is an associate professor of
Computer Science at
Hosts:
Ming C. Lin (lin@cs.unc.edu, 919-962-1974)
and Stephen Weiss (weiss@cs.unc.edu,
919-962-1888)