A symbolic-numeric silhouette algorithm

The silhouette algorithm developed by Canny (1988, 1993) is a general motion planning algorithm which is known to have the best complexity of all of the general and complete algorithms. The authors present a symbolic-numeric version of the algorithm. This version does not require the symbolic computation of the determinants of resultant matrices, and can work on floating point arithmetic. Though its combinatorial complexity remains the same, but its algebraic complexity has been improved significantly which is very important towards its implementation. Several numerical examples are also presented