Computational Science

Department of Computer Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pa.

Mobile robots in the workplace must select collision-free paths in real time, in environments that are constantly changing. A new algorithm is proposed that is based on representing obstacles in a quadtree, from data, for example, from a ceiling camera. Experimental results show faster calculations of collision-free paths than conventional algorithms.

H. Noborio, N. Tomohide, S. Arimoto, "A quadtree-based path-planning algorithm for a mobile robot," Journal of Robotic Systems, 7, 555-74, August 1990. (Osaka Electro-Communication University, Japan; Osaka University, Japan; University of Tokyo)

AND trees are widely used in artificial intelligence and operations research. The efficiency of parallel evaluation of nodes in an AND tree in order to determine the optimal number of processors to assign a problem was analyzed. The answer depends on the complexity of the problem and shape of the graph. One result of the analysis, however, reveals...