Michael Erdmann's "Whois-Me" Page

Michael Erdmann



Professor of Computer Science and Robotics,
    School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.

Co-Director, Manipulation Laboratory.

"Official" CMU homepages (automatically generated):

My Computer Science page

My Robotics Institute page

Topology and Robotics

In June 2003, a sizeable group of Topologists and Roboticists gathered at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland for a collaborative workshop. The goal of the workshop was to explore robotic motions using newly discovered topological perspectives and to build the foundations of a long-term research agenda. A brief writeup appeared in Science. Here are some pictures I took of the attendees.

In July 2006, a similar group of Topologists and Roboticists again gathered at ETH in Zurich. I did not take any pictures this time, but here is a list of the talks.

Since August 2006, my research has been part of a multi-year multi-institutional effort involving topologists and roboticists working on a variety of problems at the interface of algebraic topology and autonomous systems. This research effort, called SToMP (Sensor Topology and Minimal Planning), is led by Robert Ghrist.

Two papers related to this work:

• On the Topology of Discrete Strategies.
  This is a pre-print of a paper that appeared in the International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 29, No. 7, 2010, pp. 855-896.


• On the Topology of Discrete Planning with Uncertainty.
  This paper summarizes a lecture I gave in the Short Course on Computational Topology, January 5, 2011, during the Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans.
  (The paper appeared June 29, 2012, as a chapter in Advances in Applied and Computational Topology.)

Topology and Protein Structure

Line Weavings for the Astral 40 set of representative proteins     Structural Comparisons for a basis set of proteins

Proteins, Knots, and Line Weavings
Algorithms for comparing protein structures using geometric convolution and line weavings. An early version (without line weavings) of this report appeared at RECOMB 2004. A revised version (with line weavings and similarity trials) appeared in the Journal of Computational Biology.
(Clarification/Erratum: In Section 6.2.3 of the paper we defined the "L2 measure" using a sum of integrals, each measuring a squared error between two lines. Our code inadvertently computed the sum of the square roots of these integrals. Thus the dimensions of the "L2" values reported are actually square-root-Angstroms not Angstroms.)

Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics VI Michael Erdmann, David Hsu, Mark Overmars, Frank van der Stappen

Associated Centers

Center for the Foundations of Robotics		Aladdin Center

Editorial Board

Contact Data

 Bqaah!

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure
without losing your enthusiasm.
                  ---  Winston Churchill  (1874-1965)

sic transit gloria mundi