A important strategic phase in the planning process of a railway operator is the development of a line plan, i.e., a set of routes (paths) in a network of tracks, operated at a given hourly frequency. We consider a model formulation of the line-planning problem where total operating costs are to be minimized. This model is solved with a branch-and-cut approach, for which we develop a variety of...

This paper deals with the problem of planning and controlling the trajectories of the legs of a mobile robot moving through statically stable conngurations. Legs are supposed to possess signiicant weight compared to the chassis, and a degree of redundancy that can be used to maximize the robustness of equilibrium. We use optimal control techniques for planning joint trajectories that comply wit...

Preliminary notes The paper discusses the problem of effective motion planning for industrial robots. The first part deals with current method for off-line path planning. In the second part is presented the work done with one of the simulation systems with automatic trajectory generation and off-line programming capability. A spot welding process is involved. The practical application of this s...

The problem of planning with partial observability in the presence of a single agent has been addressed as a contingent or POMDP problem. Since the task is computationally hard, on-line approaches have also been developed that just compute the action to do next rather than full policies. In this work, we address a similar problem but in a multiagent setting where agents share a common goal and ...

Probabilistic road-map (PRM) planners have shown great promise in attacking motion planning problems with many degrees of freedom that were previously infeasible. Yet when such a planner fails to find a path, it is not clear that no path exists, or that the planner simply did not sample adequately or intelligently the free part of the configuration space. We propose to attack the motion plannin...

In this paper we study one of the most elementary problems of the topological robotics: rotation of a line, which is fixed by a revolving joint at a base point: one wants to bring the line from its initial position A to a final position B by a continuous motion in the space. The final goal is to construct a motion planning algorithm which will perform this task once the initial position A and t...

The assembly line balancing problem is a non deterministic polynomial type planning problem for mass production. Layout design changes constitute a major decision that yields investment for assembly operations and numerous heuristics have been reported in the literature for solving the line balancing problems. U-shaped assembly layout offers several benefits over traditional straight-line layou...

The use of visual sensing for action generation in unknown environments is an attractive option due to the great representation power of vision, but it is challenging for two reasons. The representations used in vision are often not well suitable for planning, thus requiring complex learning approaches. Furthermore, an active agent needs to make decisions on-line, without the delay of o -line p...