Geometric Reasoning for Perception and Action

Geometry is a powerful tool to solve a great number of problems in robotics and computer vision. Impressive results have been obtained in these fields in the last decade. It is a new challenge to solve problems of the actual world which require the ability to reason about uncertainty and complex motion constraints by combining geometric, kinematic, and dynamic characteristics. A necessary step is to develop appropriate geometric reasoning techniques with reasonable computational complexity. This volume is based on a workshop held in Grenoble, France,in September 1991. It contains selected contributions on several important areas in the field of robotics and computer vision. The four chapters cover the following areas: - motion planning with kinematic and dynamic constraints, - motion planning and control in the presence of uncertainty, - geometric problems related to visual perception, -numerical problems linked to the implementation of practical algorithms for visual perception.

Inhalt
Shortest paths of bounded curvature in the plane.- Kinodynamic planning in a structured and time-varying workspace.- Motion planning for a non-holonomic mobile robot on 3-dimensional terrains.- Optimal motion planning of a mobile robot on a triangulated terrain model.- Landmark-based robot motion planning.- Using genetic algorithms for robot motion planning.- Fast mobile robots in unstructured environments.- A new approach to visual servoing in robotics.- Geometric solutions to some 3D vision problems.- Geometrical representation of shapes and objects for visual perception.- Perceptual grouping for scene interpretation in an active vision system.- Incremental free-space modelling from uncertain data by an autonomous mobile robot.- Matching 3-D smooth surfaces with their 2-D projections using 3-D distance maps.- A new physically based model for efficient tracking and analysis of deformations.- From splines and snakes to snake splines.