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There is a growing need for spatial privacy considerations in the many geo-spatial technologies that have been created as solutions for COVID-19-related issues. Although effective geo-spatial technologies have already been rolled out, most have significantly sacrificed privacy for utility. In this paper, we explore spatial k-anonymity, a privacy-preserving method that can address this unnecessary tradeoff by providing the best of both privacy and utility. After evaluating its past implications in geo-spatial use cases, we propose applications of spatial k-anonymity in the data sharing and managing of COVID-19 contact tracing technologies as well as heat maps showing a user's travel history. We then justify our propositions by comparing spatial k-anonymity with several other spatial privacy methods, including differential privacy, geo-indistinguishability, and manual consent based redaction. Our hope is to raise awareness of the ever-growing risks associated with spatial privacy and how they can be solved with Spatial K-anonymity.

Motion planning algorithms often leverage topological information about the environment to improve planner performance. However, these methods often focus only on the environment's connectivity while ignoring other properties such as obstacle clearance, terrain conditions, and resource accessibility. We present a method that augments a skeleton representing the workspace topology with such information to guide a sampling-based motion planner to rapidly discover regions most relevant to the problem at hand. Our approach decouples guidance and planning, making it possible for basic planning algorithms to find desired paths earlier in the planning process. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in both robotics problems and applications in drug design. Our method is able to produce desirable paths quickly with no change to the underlying planner., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. Paper under review for WAFR 2020