Craig Reynolds - 2010-07-23

In late April there was a conversation in this forum called "Way to alter direction" started by Ján Zahornadský.  It touched on steering behaviors like "arrival" and "docking".  Later I was reminded of a paper related to this topic, in fact I found a follow-on paper that reminded me of the first:

Boulic, Ronan, 2008, Relaxed Steering towards Oriented Region Goals
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/147572

Boulic, Ronan, 2005, Reaching Oriented Targets with Funnelling Trajectories
http://ligwww.epfl.ch/~boulic/Steering/funnelling_traj.pdf

see also:

Proactive Steering Toward Oriented regions
http://vrlab.epfl.ch/~boulic/Steering/index.html

but what finally got me to move this topic form my to-do list to this forum was seeing this very cool robotic plane that implements something between arrival and docking, like a bird landing on a wire:

A plane that lands like a bird
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/perching-plane-0720.html

I will be on the road much of the next four weeks, but still checking in occasionally,
Craig