Browsing by Author "Gleicher, Michael"

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    MotionBenchMaker: A Tool to Generate and Benchmark Motion Planning Datasets
    (IEEE, 2022) Chamzas, Constantinos; Quintero-Peña, Carlos; Kingston, Zachary; Orthey, Andreas; Rakita, Daniel; Gleicher, Michael; Toussaint, Marc; Kavraki, Lydia E.
    Recently, there has been a wealth of development in motion planning for robotic manipulation—new motion planners are continuously proposed, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. However, evaluating new planners is challenging and researchers often create their own ad-hoc problems for benchmarking, which is time-consuming, prone to bias, and does not directly compare against other state-of-the-art planners. We present MotionBenchMaker , an open-source tool to generate benchmarking datasets for realistic robot manipulation problems. MotionBenchMaker is designed to be an extensible, easy-to-use tool that allows users to both generate datasets and benchmark them by comparing motion planning algorithms. Empirically, we show the benefit of using MotionBenchMaker as a tool to procedurally generate datasets which helps in the fair evaluation of planners. We also present a suite of 40 prefabricated datasets, with 5 different commonly used robots in 8 environments, to serve as a common ground to accelerate motion planning research.
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    Using a commodity high-definition television for collaborative structural biology
    (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014) Yennamalli, Ragothaman M.; Arangarasan, Raj; Bryden, Aaron; Gleicher, Michael; Phillips, George N.Jr.
    Visualization of protein structures using stereoscopic systems is frequently needed by structural biologists working to understand a protein's structure-function relationships. Often several scientists are working as a team and need simultaneous interaction with each other and the graphics representations. Most existing molecular visualization tools support single-user tasks, which are not suitable for a collaborative group. Expensive caves, domes or geowalls have been developed, but the availability and low cost of high-definition televisions (HDTVs) and game controllers in the commodity entertainment market provide an economically attractive option to achieve a collaborative environment. This paper describes a low-cost environment, using standard consumer game controllers and commercially available stereoscopic HDTV monitors with appropriate signal converters for structural biology collaborations employing existing binary distributions of commonly used software packages like Coot, PyMOL, Chimera, VMD, O, Olex2 and others.