Randomized Motion Planning on Manifolds and Vector Fields（セミナー・シンポジウム）

Frank Chongwoo Park
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Seoul National University
情報科学研究科講義棟　大講義室
平成２５年　７月１１日（木）１５：３０〜１７：００

In this talk we first consider the problem of robot motion planning subject to kinematic constraints, e.g., a robot grasping and manipulating an object with two arms while avoiding obstacles. Such problems can be naturally framed as a motion planning problem on a differentiable manifold. We propose a method for planning on manifolds, called the tangent bundle RRT algorithm, in which the classical rapidly exploring random tree algorithm is generalized to the tangent bundle of the manifold. The key idea is to approximate the manifold by a collection of tangent spaces, making use of local curvature information, and to apply RRT to the tangent spaces in a coordinated fashion. We show that our method offers superior performance over existing manifold planning methods, even when taking into account the increased bookkeeping overhead.

We then present a randomized motion planning algorithm on vector fields. We first provide practical examples from field robotics of planning problems on vector fields. We then propose a performance criterion, called the upstream functional, whose minima correspond to minimum control effort trajectories in a sense to be made precise. We then propose a variant of the RRT algorithm that makes use of the upstream criterion to rapidly find better trajectories than those found by the classical RRT method. The performance of our algorithm is assessed through several case studies.

Frank Park received his BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1985, and PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1991.

In 1988 he was a researcher in the Manufacturing Research Group of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. From 1991 to 1995, he was Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Since 1995, he has been Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Seoul National University, where he is currently serving as Chair of Mechanical Engineering. He has held visiting positions at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and at the Department of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

His research interests are in robot mechanics, planning, control, visual tracking, and related areas of applied mathematics. He received best conference paper awards from the Manufacturing Engineering Division of ASME in 1997, and the IEEE Int. Conference on Information and Automation in 2008. He was a recipient of the Shin-Yang Research Achievement Award from the SNU College of Engineering in 2006. In 2007-2008, he was an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Lecturer, and served as secretary of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2009-2010, and 2012-2013. He has served as senior editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, as associate
editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, and an area editor for the Springer Handbook of Robotics and Advanced Tracts in Robotics (STAR). He will serve as the next Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions
on Robotics. He is a fellow of IEEE.