Ray (segment) shooting is the problem of determining the first intersection between a ray (directed line segment) and a collection of polygonal or polyhedral obstacles. In order to process queries efficiently, the set of obstacle polyhedra is usually preprocessed into a data structure. In this paper, we propose a query-sensitive data structure for ray shooting, which means that the performance of our data structure depends on the "local" geometry of obstacles near the query segment. We measure the complexity of the local geometry near the segment by a parameter called the simple cover complexity , denoted by scc(s) for a segment s. Our data structure consists of a subdivision that partitions the space into a collection of polyhedral cells of O(1) complexity. We answer a segment shooting query by walking along the segment through the subdivision. Our first result is that, for any fixed dimension d, there exists a simple hierarchical subdivision in which no query segment s int...

A visibility ordering of a set of objects, from a given viewpoint, is a total order on the objects such that if object a obstructs object b,thenb precedes a in the ordering. Such orderings are extremely useful for rendering volumetric data. We present an algorithm that generates a visibility ordering of the cells of an unstructured mesh, provided that the cells are convex polyhedra and nonintersecting, and that the visibility ordering graph does not contain cycles. The overall mesh may be nonconvex and it may have disconnected components. Our technique employs the sweep paradigm to determine an ordering between pairs of exterior (mesh boundary) cells which can obstruct one another. It then builds on Williams' MPVO algorithm [33] which exploits the ordering implied by adjacencies within the mesh. The partial ordering of the exterior cells found by sweeping is used to augment the DAG created in Phase II of the MPVO algorithm. Our method thus removes the assumption of the MPVO algorithm t...

We show that the complexity of the vertical decomposition of an arrangement of n fixeddegree algebraic surfaces or surface patches in four dimensions is O(n 4+ε), for any ε> 0. This improves the best previously known upper bound for this problem by a near-linear factor, and settles a major problem in the theory of arrangements of surfaces, open since 1989. The new bound can be extended to higher dimensions, yielding the bound O(n 2d−4+ε), for any ε> 0, on the complexity of vertical decompositions in dimensions d ≥ 4. We also describe the immediate algorithmic applications of these results, which include improved algorithms for point location, range searching, ray shooting, robot motion planning, and some geometric optimization problems. 1

Contents Acknowledgements 3 Foreword 9 1 Introduction 11 2 PreviousWork 14 2.1 The Radiosity equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.1.1 Rendering Equation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.1.2 Rendering Equation for diffuse surfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2.1.3 The Radiosity system of equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.4 Two forms of the Form Factor integral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.1.5 The Form Factor integral as a contour integral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.1.6 Differential area to area Form Factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2 Computing the Form Factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2.1 Deterministic numerical solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.3 Monte Carlo evaluation of the Form Factor integral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

this paper is (1) to give three new applications of these concepts to 2-dimensional visibility problems, and (2) to study realizability questions suggested by the pseudotriangle-pseudoline duality; see Figure 1. Our first application is related to the ray-shooting problem in the plane: preprocess a set of objects into a data structure such that the first object hit by a query ray can be computed efficiently. In section 3 we show that for a scene of n objects, where the objects are pairwise disjoint convex sets with m 'simple' arcs in total, one can obtain O(log m) query time using

Delaunay triangulations and Voronoi diagrams are one of the most thoroughly studies objects in computational geometry, with numerous applications including nearest-neighbor searching, clustering, finite-element mesh generation, deformable surface modeling, and surface reconstruction. Many algorithms in these application domains begin by constructing the Delaunay triangulation or Voronoi diagram of a set of points in R³. Since three-dimensional Delaunay triangulations can have complexity Ω(n²) in the worst case, these algorithms have worst-case running time \Omega (n2). However, this behavior is almost never observed in practice except for highly-contrived inputs. For all practical purposes, three-dimensional Delaunay triangulations appear to have linear complexity. This frustrating

Assembly planning is the problem of finding a sequence of motions to assemble a product from its parts. We present a general framework for finding assembly motions based on the concept of motion space. Assembly motions are parameterized such that each point in motion space represents a mating motion that is independent of the moving part set. For each motion we derive blocking relations that explicitly state which parts collide with other parts; each subassembly (rigid subset of parts) that does not collide with the rest of the assembly can easily be derived from the blocking relations. Motion space is partitioned into an arrangement of cells such that the blocking relations are fixed within each cell. In the first part of the paper we give background material, present the motion space approach and describe applications of the approach to assembly motions of several useful types, including one-step translations, multi-step translations, and infinitesimal rigid motions. Several efficien...

Our work examines various complexity measures for two-handed assembly sequences. For many products there exists an exponentially large set of valid sequences, and a natural goal is to use automated systems to select wisely from the choices. Since assembly sequencing is a preprocessing phase for a long and expensive manufacturing process, any work towards ndinga\better" assembly sequence isofgreat value when it comes time to assemble the physical product in mass quantities. We take a step in this direction by introducing a formal framework for studying the optimization of several complexity measures. This framework focuses on the combinatorial aspect of the family of valid assembly sequences, while temporarily separating out the speci c geometric assumptions inherent to the problem. With an exponential number of possibilities, nding the true optimal cost solution is non-trivial. In fact in the most general case, our results show that even nding an approximate solution is hard. Furthermore, we can show several hardness results, even in simple geometric settings. Future work is directed towards using this model to study how the original geometric assumptions can be reintroduced toprove stronger approximation results. 1

We prove the existence of linear size binary space partitions for sets of objects in the plane under certain conditions that are often satisfied in practical situations. In particular, we construct linear size binary space partitions for sets of fat objects, for sets of line segments where the ratio between the lengths of the longest and shortest segment is bounded by a constant, and for homothetic objects. For all cases we also show how to turn the existence proofs into efficient algorithms.

A familiar task in industrial applications is grasping an object to constrain its motions. When the external forces and torques acting on the object are uncertain or varying, form-closure grasps are preferred; these are grasps that constrain all infinitesimal and finite motion of the object. Much of previous work on computing form-closures has involved achieving it with point-contacts; for a planar object, four point-contacts were proven to be necessary and sufficient. Inspired by the intuitive habit of supporting an object against something flat to immobilize it, in this paper we propose a new class of contacts called edge-contacts; these offer a straight-line support against which the object rests. Our first result is that almost any polygonal part can be constrained in form-closure with an edge-contact and two point-contacts. A related problem is that of immobilizing an object with modular fixtures. These typically comprise of a regular lattice of holes on which the object is placed...