Invariants for homology classes with application to optimal search and planning problem in robotics (Q360246)

Motivated by applications to the path planning problem in robotics, the authors consider the problem of giving an explicit construction of homology and cohomology classes of \({\mathbb R}^D-\tilde \mathcal O\), where \(\tilde \mathcal O\subset \mathbb R^D\) is a subset representing the obstacles. The authors review the classical notions and results from algebraic topology (such as the intersection numbers and the linking numbers) and describe explicitly the homology of \({\mathbb R}^D-\tilde \mathcal O\) under certain natural assumptions. The authors give an application to graph search-based robot path planning with topological constraints.