Visualization of Nonlinear Programming for Robot Motion Planning
This addresses the problem of making complex nonlinear programming more accessible for robotics experts, though it appears incremental as an application of visual analytics to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled the challenge of helping domain experts understand and troubleshoot high-dimensional nonlinear optimization with many constraints by developing a visual analytics system for robot motion planning, reporting positive experiences from a design study with domain experts.
Nonlinear programming targets nonlinear optimization with constraints, which is a generic yet complex methodology involving humans for problem modeling and algorithms for problem solving. We address the particularly hard challenge of supporting domain experts in handling, understanding, and trouble-shooting high-dimensional optimization with a large number of constraints. Leveraging visual analytics, users are supported in exploring the computation process of nonlinear constraint optimization. Our system was designed for robot motion planning problems and developed in tight collaboration with domain experts in nonlinear programming and robotics. We report on the experiences from this design study, illustrate the usefulness for relevant example cases, and discuss the extension to visual analytics for nonlinear programming in general.