Bruce Randall Donald
Kevin Lynch
Daniela Rus
Robot algorithms are abstractions of computational processes that control or reason about motion and perception in the physical world. The computation may be implemented in software, hard-wired electronics, biomolecular mechanisms, or purely mechanical devices. Because actions in the physical world are subject to physical laws and geometric constraints, the design and analysis of robot algorithms raises a unique combination of questions in control theory, computational and differential geometry, and computer science. Algorithms serve as a unifying theme in the multi-disciplinary field of robotics.
The Fourth International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) brought together a group of about sixty researchers to discuss recent trends and important future directions of research on the algorithmic foundations of robotics. Held at Dartmouth College on March 16-18, 2000, the workshop was chaired by Bruce Randall Donald (Dartmouth), Kevin Lynch (Northwestern), and Daniela Rus (Dartmouth). The workshop consisted of six invited talks and twenty-four contributed presentations in a single track. Each paper was rigorously refereed by the program chairs plus at least three members of the program committee. The program committee consisted of the conference chairs plus Pankaj Agarwal (Duke), Srinivas Akella (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Nancy Amato (Texas A&M), Antonio Bicchi (University of Pisa), Kamal Kant Gupta (Simon Fraser), Leslie Kaelbling (MIT), Makoto Kaneko (University of Hiroshima), David Kriegman (UIUC), Steve LaValle (Iowa State), Dinesh Manocha (UNC), Jim Ostrowski (University of Pennsylvania), John Reif (Duke), and Elisha Sacks (Purdue).
Topics reported at WAFR 2000 included geometric algorithms, minimalist and underactuated robotics, robot controllability, manufacturing and assembly, holonomic and nonholonomic motion planning, manipulation planning, sensor-based planning, task-level planning, grasping, navigation, biomimetics, medical robotics, self-assembly, modular and reconfigurable robots, and distributed manipulation. This book contains the proceedings of WAFR 2000. A number of these papers are clearly destined to be landmarks in the field. For example, the paper ``Meso-Scale Self-Assembly'' by Gracias, Choi, Weck, and Whitesides was voted number three in the ``Top Five Must Read Papers Recommended by the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science Faculty'' for the year 2000. It is worth noting that numbers one and two were each written more than 40 years ago, and ``Meso-Scale Self-Assembly'' was voted ahead of number four, Judge Jackson's findings of fact against Microsoft. This demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary interaction at workshops such as WAFR.
We are very grateful to Dartmouth College and Sandia National Laboratories for their generous financial support of WAFR. We would like to thank all participants for their contributions. We thank Dartmouth Project Assistant David Bellows for all his assistance in organizing WAFR and in typesetting the book and Fred Henle for his advice and asstance with LATEX and image enhancement.
Bruce Randall Donald
June, 2000
| Pankaj Agarwal | Duke University |
| Srinivas Akella | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| Nancy Amato | Texas A&M |
| Boris Aronov | Polytechnic University |
| Devin Balkcom | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Matthew Berkemeier | Utah State University |
| Antonio Bicchi | University of Pisa |
| Amy Briggs | Middlebury College |
| Herve Bronimann | Polytechnic University |
| Joel Burdick | California Institute of Technology |
| Zack Butler | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Ming C. Lin | University of North Carolina Chapel Hill |
| Greg Chirikjian | Johns Hopkins University |
| Anne Collins | Duke University |
| Bruce Randall Donald | Dartmouth |
| Michael Erdmann | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Robert Ghrist | Georgia Institute of Tech. |
| Ken Goldberg | University of California Berkeley |
| W. Eric L. Grimson | MIT |
| Kamal Gupta | Simon Fraser University |
| John H. Reif | Duke University |
| Dan Halperin | Tel Aviv University |
| Li Han | Texas A&M |
| John Hollerbach | University of Utah |
| David Hsu | Stanford University |
| Wesley Huang | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| Seth Hutchinson | University of Illinois |
| Leonidas J. Guibas | Stanford University |
| Xuerong Ji | University of North Carolina Charlotte |
| Satoshi Kagami | University of Tokyo |
| Fumio Kanehiro | University of Tokyo |
| Makoto Kaneko | Hiroshima University |
| Lydia Kavraki | Rice University |
| Eric Klavins | University of Michigan |
| Daniel Koditschek | University of Michigan |
| James Kuffner | University of Tokyo |
| Steven LaValle | Iowa State University |
| Florent Lamiraux | LAAS-CNRS |
| Jean-Claude Latombe | Stanford University |
| Jean-Paul Laumond | LAAS-CNRS |
| Kevin Lynch | Northwestern University |
| Dinesh Manocha | University of North Carolina Chapel Hill |
| Matt Mason | Carnegie Mellon University |
| William Messner | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Mark Moll | Carnegie Mellon University |
| An Nguyen | Stanford University |
| Jim Ostrowski | University of Pennsylvania |
| Elon Rimon | Technion University Israel |
| Alfred Rizzi | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Daniela Rus | Dartmouth |
| Elisha Sacks | Purdue University |
| Daniel Scharstein | Middlebury College |
| Edward Scheinerman | Johns Hopkins University |
| A. Frank van der Stappen | Utrecht University |
| Ileana Streinu | Smith |
| Robert Sun | Duke University |
| George Whitesides | Harvard |
| Jing Xiao | University of North Carolina Charlotte |
| Mark Yim | Xerox PARC |
| Tao (Mike) Zhang | University of California Berkeley |
| Li Zhang | Stanford University |
| Yan Zhuang | University of California Berkeley |
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 98.1p1 release (March 2nd, 1998)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -local_icons -white -t WAFR 2000 -split 0 preface4.
The translation was initiated by Bruce Randall Donald on 2000-08-18