Michael McAllister

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About

Michael McAllister is a computational geometer whose work has shaped how we solve fundamental spatial problems—from finding the nearest hospital to planning a robot’s path through obstacles. His most influential contribution, the compact piecewise-linear Voronoi diagram for convex sites in the plane, tackles two classic challenges: the post-office problem (identifying the closest site to any query point) and retraction motion planning (finding a one-dimensional safe path for a robot). By extending Voronoi diagrams from points to disjoint convex obstacles, McAllister provided an elegant, memory-efficient representation that is both theoretically rigorous and practically implementable. His 1996 paper on this topic has garnered 66 citations, serving as a foundational reference for researchers in computational geometry, robotics, and geographic information systems. McAllister’s work bridges theory and application, offering tools that are as useful for a student learning geometric algorithms as for an engineer designing autonomous navigation systems. His compact diagram remains a go-to solution for problems requiring efficient nearest-neighbor queries or collision-free path planning in cluttered environments.