A guarding problem can naturally be modeled as a set system (U ,S) in which the universe U of elements is the set of points we need to guard and our collection S of sets contains, for each potential guard g, the set of points from U seen by g. We prove bounds on the maximum VC-dimension of set systems associated with guarding both 1.5D terrains (monotone chains) and 2.5D terrains (polygonal ter...

In this work, we implement the floating base prioritized whole-body compliant control framework described in Sentis et al. (IEEE Transactions on Robotics 26(3):483– 501, 2010) on a wheeled humanoid robot maneuvering in sloped terrains. We then test it for a variety of compliant whole-body behaviors including balance and kinesthetic mobility on irregular terrain, and Cartesian hand position trac...

The generation and real-time rendering of terrain are related problems that occur in the development of virtual reality and gaming applications. These applications must be able to create and render realistic terrains at interactive rates. In many applications it is desirable to generate unique terrains instead of reusing static geometry time and again. Finally, all applications that render larg...

Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow the animals to deal with changes in environmental conditions, like uneven terrains, gaps, obstacles etc. Biological study has revealed that such complex beha...

The random midpoint displacement method is a widely applied algorithm used for terrain simulation. This paper first reviews the underlying theory and the algorithm of the random midpoint displacement method and then analyzes the characteristics of the simulated terrain. An implementation is developed for the successive random addition midpoint displacement method using the programming language ...

This article presents a multicontact motion adaptation framework that enables teleoperation of high degree-of-freedom robots, such as quadrupeds and humanoids, for loco-manipulation tasks in settings. Our proposed algorithms optimize whole-body configurations formulate the retargeting motions sequential quadratic programming, which is robust stable near edges feasibility constraints. allows rea...

This study explores the concept of evolving game terrains through intermediation of living biological organisms and presents a proof of concept realization thereof. We explore how fungal and bacterial cultures can be used to generate an evolving game terrain in real-time. By visually capturing growing cultures inside a Petri-dish, heightmaps are generated that form the basis of naturally evolvi...

Que peut-on apprendre de l’observation, dans une même enquête, terrains et cas qui sont habituellement étudiés séparément ? Quel est l’intérêt heuristique cette comparaison Le présent article propose répondre à ces questions travers l’exemple d’une étude sociologique portant sur les savoirs institutions d’enseignement. Dans enquête terrain, j’ai observé simultanément la transmission des deux d’...

Fractal terrains provide an easy way to generate realistic landscapes. There are several methods to generate fractal terrains, but none of those algorithms allow the user much flexibility in controlling the shape or properties of the final outcome. A few methods to modify fractal terrains have been previously proposed, both algorithm-based as well as by hand editing, but none of these provide a...