There has been increased research interest in systems composed of multiple autonomous mobile robots exhibiting collective behavior. Groups of mobile robots are constructed, with an aim to studying such issues as group architecture, resource conflict, origin of cooperation, learning, and geometric problems. As yet, few applications of collective robotics have been reported, and supporting theory is still in its formative stages. In this paper, we give a critical survey of existing works and discuss open problems in this field, emphasizing the various theoretical issues that arise in the study of cooperative robotics. We describe the intellectual heritages that have guided early research, as well as possible additions to the set of existing motivations. 1

In this survey we consider geometric techniques which have been used to measure the similarity or distance between shapes, as well as to approximate shapes, or interpolate between shapes. Shape is a modality which plays a key role in many disciplines, ranging from computer vision to molecular biology. We focus on algorithmic techniques based on computational geometry that have been developed for shape matching, simplification, and morphing. 1 Introduction The matching and analysis of geometric patterns and shapes is of importance in various application areas, in particular in computer vision and pattern recognition, but also in other disciplines concerned with the form of objects such as cartography, molecular biology, and computer animation. The general situation is that we are given two objects A, B and want to know how much they resemble each other. Usually one of the objects may undergo certain transformations like translations, rotations or scalings in order to be matched with th...

Given two planar sets A and B, we examine the problem of determining the smallest " such that there is a Euclidean motion (rotation and translation) of A that brings each member of A within distance " of some member of B. We establish upper bounds on the combinatorial complexity of this subproblem in model-based computer vision, when the sets A and B contain points, line segments, or (filled-in) polygons. We also show how to use our methods to substantially improve on existing algorithms for finding the minimum Hausdorff distance under Euclidean motion. 1 Author's address: Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. This work was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under ONR Contract N00014-92-J-1989, and by ONR Contract N00014-92-J-1839, NSF Contract IRI-9006137, and AFOSR Contract AFOSR-91-0328. 2 Author's address: Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218. This work was suppo...

For two given point sets, we present a very simple (almost trivial) algorithm to translate one set so that the Hausdorff distance between the two sets is not larger than a constant factor times the minimum Hausdorff distance which can be achieved in this way. The algorithm just matches the so-called Steiner points of the two sets. The focus of our paper is the general study of reference points (like the Steiner point) and their properties with respect to shape matching. For more general transformations than just translations, our method eliminates several degrees of freedom from the problem and thus yields good matchings with improved time bounds. 1 Introduction This paper is motivated by a problem that is typical in application areas such as computer vision or pattern recognition, namely, given two figures A; B, to determine how much they "resemble each other". Here, a "figure" will be a union of finitely many points and line segments in R 2 or triangles in R 3 . Note t...

In geometric pattern matching, we are given two sets of points P and Q in d dimensions, and the problem is to determine the rigid transformation that brings P closest to Q, under some distance measure. More generally, each point can be modelled as a ball of small radius, and we may wish to nd a transformation approximating the closest distance between P and Q. This problem has many applications in domains such as computer vision and computational chemistry In this paper we present improved algorithms for this problem, by allowing the running time of our algorithms to depend not only on n, (the number of points in the sets), but also on, the diameter of the point set. The dependence on also allows us to e ectively process point sets that occur in practice, where diameters tend to be small ([EVW94]). Our algorithms are also simple to implement, in contrast to much of the earlier work. To obtain the above-mentioned results, we introduce a novel discretization technique to reduce geometric pattern matching to combinatorial pattern matching. In addition, we address various generalizations of the classical problem rst posed by Erdos: \Given a set of n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly a unit distance apart?". The combinatorial bounds we prove enable us to obtain improved results for geometric pattern matching and may have other applications.

This paper is accepted for publication in ALGORITHMICA Abstract Let A and B be two sets of n objects in Rd, and let Match be a (one-to-one)matching between A and B. Let min(Match), max(Match), and \Sigma (Match) denote thelength of the shortest edge, the length of the longest edge, and the sum of the lengths of the edges of Match respectively. Bottleneck matching--a matching that minimizesmax( Match)--is suggested as a convenient way for measuring the resemblance between A and B. Several algorithms for computing, as well as approximating, this resemblanceare proposed. The running time of all the algorithms involving planar objects is roughly O(n1.5). For instance, if the objects are points in the plane, the running time of the exactalgorithm is O(n1.5 log n). A semi-dynamic data-structure for answering containmentproblems for a set of congruent disks in the plane is developed. This data structure may be of independent interest.Next, the problem of finding a translation of B that maximizes the resemblance to A under the bottleneck matching criterion is considered. When A and B are point-setsin the plane, an O(n5 log n) time algorithm for determining whether for some translatedcopy the resemblance gets below a given ae is presented, thus improving the previousresult of Alt, Mehlhorn, Wagener and Welzl by a factor of almost n. This result is usedto compute the smallest such ae in time O(n5 log2 n), and an efficient approximationscheme for this problem is also given. The uniform matching problem (also called the balanced assignment problem, or thefair matching problem) is to find Match*U, a matching that minimizes max(Match)-min ( Match). A minimum deviation matching Match*D is a matching that minimizes(1 /n)\Sigma (Match)- min(Match). Algorithms for computing Match*U and Match*D inroughly O(n10/3) time are presented. These algorithms are more efficient than theprevious

We present techniques for matching point-sets in two and three dimensions under rigid-body transformations. We prove bounds on the worst-case performance of these algorithms to be within a small constant factor of optimal and conduct experiments to show that the average performance of these matching algorithms is often better than that predicted by the worst-case bounds.

One of the basic building blocks in any point-based registration scheme involves matching feature points that are extracted from a sensed image to their counterparts in a reference image. This leads to the fundamental problem of point matching: Given two sets of points, find the (affine) transformation that transforms one point set so that its distance from the other point set is minimized. Because of measurement errors and the presence of outlying data points, it is important that the distance measure between the two point sets be robust to these effects. We measure distances using the partial Hausdorff distance. Point matching can be a computationally intensive task, and a number of theoretical and applied approaches have been proposed for solving this problem. In this paper, we present two algorithmic approaches to the point matching problem, in an attempt to reduce its computational complexity, while still providing a guarantee of the quality of the final match. Our first method is an approximation algorithm, which is loosely based on a branch-andbound

In this paper, we undertake a performance study of some recent algorithms for geometric pattern matching. These algorithms cover two general paradigms for pattern matching; alignment and combinatorial pattern matching. We present analytical and empirical evaluations of these schemes. Our results indicate that a proper implementation of an alignmentbased method outperforms other (often asymptotically better) approaches.

The problem of computing a largest common point set (LCP) between two point sets under "-congruence with the bottleneck matching metric has recently been a subject of extensive study. Although polynomial time solutions are known for the planar case and for restricted sets of transformations and metrics (like translations and the Hausdor-metric under L1-norm), no complexity results are formally known for the general problem. In this paper we give polynomial time algorithms for this problem under dierent classes of transformations and metrics for any xed dimension, and establish NP-hardness for unbounded dimensions. Any solution to this (or related) problem, especially in higher dimensions, is generally believed to involve implementation diculties because they rely on the computation of intersections between algebraic surfaces. We show that (contrary to intuitive expectations) this problem can be solved under a rational arithmetic model in a straightforward manner if th...