Software

The following software was developed by me or in collaboration with my students:

• Lin-Canny collision detector. First implementation in Lisp by Ming Lin. There is an ftp-able system called I-collide written in C, and based on code by Brian Mirtich. Has been downloaded to 350 sites, and has a mailing list with 45 users.
• Algebra Toolkit. Ashu Rege and Ioannis Emiris have written most of the pieces of an ``algebra toolkit''. The toolkit is a library of routines for fast polynomial equation-solving and queries on polynomial constraint systems (inequalities). Mixed volume and sparse resultant code is available now, an Alpha release of the full Toolkit is due in a month.
• IMPULSE. Impulse is a general-purpose dynamic simulation system written by Brian Mirtich. Other students working on the project are Francesca Barrientos, Dina Berkowitz, Eric Paulos and Dan Resnik. It provides close to real-time performance for complex 3d simulations, and produces accurate quantitative predictions of physical behaviour. IMPULSE currently runs on SGI and HP platforms with Z-buffer graphics, but is being broken down into modules so that simulation can be done on platforms without graphics. We anticipate binary distributions for several platforms early next year.
• Perturbations/ Convex Hull. Ioannis Emiris and I developed an efficient and practical scheme for eliminating degeneracies in geometric algorithms. It increases the running time of geometric predicates by a small constant factor (4-8). Ioannis wrote a robust, exact convex hull program using the perturbation scheme, which is available by pub ftp from the geometry center in Minneapolis. It was integrated with and is now included in the most widely-used robot programming system ``Cimstation'', sold by the Silma Division of Adept Robotics.