A topological study of robot free configuration space

Author

Sun, Kang ; Lumelsky, V.J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Yale Univ., New Haven, CT, USA

fYear

1991

fDate

3-5 Nov 1991

Firstpage

575

Abstract

Studies the topology of the free configuration space (FCS) of any robot that consists of one or more connected rigid bodies and operates in an environment with obstacles. It is shown that if a certain unrestrictive robot-obstacle spatial relationship is satisfied, then FCS is uniformly locally connected (ULC). Conditions are derived under which the FCS boundary presents a manifold. Although the ULC property is not sufficient for the general case, it is shown that for the two-dimensional (2D) case the ULC property guarantees that FCS is bounded by simple curves. This result provides an effective tool for reducing the robot motion problem to the analysis of simple closed curves in the robot configuration space

Keywords

planning (artificial intelligence); robots; topology; motion planning; robot free configuration space; topological study; unrestrictive robot-obstacle spatial relationship; Capacitive sensors; Computational geometry; Manifolds; Mechanical engineering; Motion planning; Orbital robotics; Robot motion; Robot sensing systems; Sun; Topology;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems '91. 'Intelligence for Mechanical Systems, Proceedings IROS '91. IEEE/RSJ International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Osaka

Print_ISBN

0-7803-0067-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.1991.174537

Filename

174537