After working during the 80's on exact and approximated methods, we started working in the early 90's on probabilistic approaches introduced both in Stanford and Utrecht and now actively explored by our colleagues in Houston, Urbana Champaign, College Station, Chapel Hill, Grenoble, Singapour... We mainly focuse on:

• the control of the probabilistic algorithms (introducing visibility criteria in the CSpace search)
• the extension of the general schemes to complex kinematic chains (close loop chains, parallel mechanisms...)
• providing parameter-free algorithms

Selected Publications:

"Sampling-based motion planning under kinematic loop-closure constraint"    
J.CORTES and T.SIMEON
Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Utrecht, 2004

"An iterative diffusion algorithm for part disassembly"    
E.FERRE and J.P.LAUMOND
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans (US), 2004

"Probabilistic motion planning for parallel mechanisms"    
J.CORTES and T.SIMEON
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Taipei (Taiwan), 2003

"Visibility-based probabilistic roadmaps for motion planning"    
T.SIMEON , J.P.LAUMOND and C.NISSOUX
Journal of Advanced Robotics, Vol.14, N°6, pp.477-494, 2000

In the late 1990's we launched the development of Move3D, a generic software platform that benefits from the last research developments in robot motion planning. This platform is a valuable tool for all our theoretical and practical research work. It enables a user to model many kinds of mechanical systems: free-flying, manipulators, nonholonomic mobile vehicles, mobile manipulators, virtual beings, molecules... The main ingredients are an efficient collision checker, a geometric modelling library, a steering method library and a set of probabilistic algorithms based on sampling or diffusion techniques.

Selected Publications:

"Move3D: a generic platform for path planning"    
T.SIMEON , J.P.LAUMOND and F.LAMIRAUX
IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning, Fukuoka (Japan), 2001