On Some Applications of Computational Geometry in Manufacturing and Virtual Environments (Extended Abstract)

? ) Joseph S. B. Mitchell Applied Mathematics and Statistics, SUNY Stony Brook, NY 11794-3600, USA; [email protected], http://ams.sunysb.edu/~jsbm/jsbm.html Abstract. There are many motivating applications for the study of computational geometry problems. In this talk, we briefly touch on two such application domains --- manufacturing and virtual environments. We discuss a few of the applications-driven computational geometry problems in these domains and point to some possible future research directions that will assist in transferring algorithmic methods into practice. 1 Manufacturing Advanced manufacturing has been identified as one of the critical technologies for economic competitiveness. The goal is to make manufacturing systems more flexible and more automated, from the design stage, to the prototyping, process planning, and quality control stages. Flexibility and automation require sophisticated software tools and systems, often utilizing computationally intensive algori..