The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Robots sense, move and act in the physical world. It is therefore natural that understanding the geometry of the problem at hand is often key to devising an effective robotic solution. I will review several problems in robotics and automation in whose solution geometry plays a major role. These include designing optimized 3D printable fixtures, object rearrangement by robot arm manipulators, and efficient coordination of the motion of large teams of robots. As we shall see, exploiting geometric structure can, among other benefits, lead to reducing the dimensionality of the underlying search space and in turn to efficient solutions. Short bio: Dan Halperin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, after which he spent three years at the Computer Science Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University. He then joined the Department of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, where he is currently a full professor and for two years was the department chair. Halperin’s main field of research is Computational Geometry and Its Applications. Application areas he is interested in include robotics, automated manufacturing, algorithmic motion planning, and 3D printing. A major focus of Halperin’s work has been in research and development of robust geometric software, in collaboration with a group of European universities and research institutes: the CGAL project and library. Halperin was the program-committee chair/co-chair of several conferences in computational geometry, algorithms and robotics, including SoCG, WAFR, ESA, and ALENEX. Halperin is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.