Subject: referee report

From: Rajeev Motwani <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 97 13:49:41 PDT

I enclose the referee report for our invited paper in JCSS.
Lydia and I have revised the paper and sent it off for being
published.

I enclose the new tex file in the next message.

Rajeev

Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 12:02:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: Hal Gabow <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
cc: [email-masked]
Subject: JCSS submission 

Attached is a referee's report on your J.CSS submission. The report is
positive. Please revise the paper taking the referee's suggestions into
account, along with any other changes you see fit, and forward three
copies to me at your earliest convenience. If possible a brief summary
of the changes made will be helpful.

Thanks for your patience,
Hal Gabow

---------------------------------

Review of Kavraki, Latombe, Motwani, and Raghavan:
Randomized Query Processing in Robot Path Planning

For Journal of Computer and System Science 

---------------------------------

This paper provides an elegant explanation of the observed success of
an algorithm known as Randomized Path Planning.  It might be better
titled: Explaining the Effectiveness of Randomized Preprocessing for
Robot Path Planning.  The authors propose and prove several new
results based on a volumetric analysis of configuration space.

The paper is an important contribution, extremely well-written, and
I highly recommend its publication.  A few comments:  

The analysis seems to assume a uniform distribution of queries.  If
so, can this be stated explicitly and discussed?

I would like to see more on how to remove cusps and tangency points (p
5) as this is not adequately covered by the (very clever!) multi-path
extension in section 5.2.  In particular, how can we detect and
"remove" such regions in a high-dimensional configuration space?  I
suspect that these regions (where often where parts are almost in
contact) may be unavoidable for problems such as disassembly/assembly
planning.  

Is there any hope for a hybrid planner: eg, could a voronoi diagram be
found in regions of low e-goodness?  Could we characterize/bound
e-goodness based on input geometry and robot kinematics?

What is the relation between e-goodness and safety?

I'd like to see more on implications for art gallery problems:  for
example, could there be a relation between the extended definition
(e,t) goodness and galleries with t mirrors?

The date in reference 13 is missing.