On circular Cylinders by Four or Five Points in Space

We are interested in computing effectively cylinders through 5 points, and in other problems involved in metrology. In particular, we consider the cylinders through 4 points with a fix radius and with extremal radius. For these different problems, we give bounds on the number of solutions and exemples show that these bounds are optimal. Finally, we describe two algebraic methods which can be used here to solve efficiently these problems and some experimentation results.