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Spring Topology and Dynamical Systems Conference 2003
March 20-22, 2003
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX, USA

Organizers
Wayne Lewis, Razvan Gelca, Harold Bennett, Carl Seaquist

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Coordination, complexes, and curvature: topological methods for robotics
by
Robert Ghrist
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Theoretical robotics is a vast resource of naturally arising - or organic - topological configuration spaces. This talk will survey a few contemporary issues in theoretical robotics and unearth some of the topological structures implicit in control and motion-planning. Specifically, we will consider the following questions:

1. Can robotics ever lead to topology that we care about?
2. Can topology ever honestly help with computations in robotics?
These questions will be addressed by considering -metamorphic- (or shape-changing) robots. Their analysis will incorporate core ideas from geometric topology and geometric group theory.

Date received: February 24, 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cajz-54.