This award supports Dr. Maria L. Gini, the co-PI, Dr. Daniel Boley, and a graduate student from the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities in a collaboration with Heinz W`rn of the Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe. Both groups are working on motion planning for autonomous robots to allow them to move safely through their environment. The collaboration brings together U.S. and German groups to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of robot planning by means of parallel algorithms by developing fast and portable parallel-search algorithms. The U.S. and German groups will contribute complementary facets of the overall project and integrate those efforts for validation, testing, and comparison. Not only will the research help design robots that can make real-time adaptations to their environment, but will aid in the larger task of understanding the interplay between random search and heuristics.
