Amusing colloquium notice...

General
1

> **************************************************************
> * RESEARCH SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING *
> * *
> * COLLOQUIUM *
> **************************************************************
> by
>
> Elijah Polak Professor in the Graduate School
> Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
> Sciences University of California Berkeley CA
>
>Title: PLANNING MINIMUM TIME PATHS IN THE PRESENCE OF OBSTACLES Date: Friday
>November 14th Time: 11:00 Venue: Seminar Room A105, RSISE Building (115),
>North Road ANU

    It's worth pointing out that this seminar will be given in Canberra,
    Australia (not at UC Berkeley, as I mistakenly thought what I first read
    the posting)!

    I've contacted Prof. Polak, who's apparently in Sydney, Australia, at
    the moment. He doesn't have a Web page on the seminar contents, although
    a paper will appear in the SIAM "Journal on Optimization".

    So, any Australian unicyclists that are in a position to attend this
    seminar, please do so, and take good notes for the rest of us!

                                    Craig Milo Rogers
2

I was skipping through my email this morning, a mix of unicycling posts and more
official university notices. I got to this one and did a genuine double take!

James :slight_smile:

 **************************************************************
 *  RESEARCH SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING *
 *                                                            *
 *                       COLLOQUIUM *
 **************************************************************
                            by

                      Elijah Polak Professor in the Graduate School
                      Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
                      Sciences University of California Berkeley CA

Title: PLANNING MINIMUM TIME PATHS IN THE PRESENCE OF OBSTACLES Date: Friday
November 14th Time: 11:00 Venue: Seminar Room A105, RSISE Building (115),
North Road ANU

Abstract:

We will consider the problem of computing a minimum time path for a unicyclist
who must avoid obstacles with corners. We will show that this is an optimal
control problem with max-min type constraints that possess some unusual
properties. We will introduce a transformation technique to convert this
problem into an ordinary optimal control problem and describe the sequence of
steps that enabled us to solve this problem using ordinary nonlinear
programming code. This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Carlos
Kirjner-Neto (a former graduate student).