Richard.Wallstein@A.CS.CMU.EDU (10/20/86)
Robotics Seminar, FRIDAY Oct. 24, 2 PM, 4623 WeH John H. Reif Computer Science Department Duke University ADVANCES IN THE THEORY OF COMPUTATIONAL ROBOTICS This talk surveys work on the computational complexity of various movement planning problems relevant to robotics. The generalized mover's problem is to plan a sequence of movements of linked polyhedra through 3-dimensional Euclidean space, avoiding contact with a fixed set of polyhedra obstacles. We discuss algorithms for solving restricted mover's problems and our proof that generalized mover's problems are polynominal space hard. We also discuss our results on the computational complexity (both algorithms and lower bounds) of three other quite different types of movement problems; 1. movement planning in the presence of friction; 2. minimal movement planning; 3. dynamic movement planning with moving obstacles.