Oriented robot motion planning in Riemannian manifolds

DOI10.1016/J.TOPOL.2019.02.047MaRDI QIDQ1737981zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Publication date 24 April 2019

Published in Topology and its Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06281

frame bundles robot motion planning topological complexity topological robotics

Lyusternik-Shnirel'man category of a space, topological complexity à la Farber, topological robotics (topological aspects) (55M30) Sphere bundles and vector bundles in algebraic topology (55R25)

Abstract: We consider the problem of robot motion planning in an oriented Riemannian manifold as a topological motion planning problem in its oriented frame bundle. For this purpose, we study the topological complexity of oriented frame bundles, derive an upper bound for this invariant and certain lower bounds from cup length computations. In particular, we show that for large classes of oriented manifolds, e.g. for spin manifolds, the topological complexity of the oriented frame bundle is bounded from below by the dimension of the base manifold.

Review text

In [Discrete Comput. Geom. 29, No. 2, 211--221 (2003; Zbl 1038.68130)], \textit{M. Farber} has introduced the notion of topological complexity $\text{TC}$ of a space $X$ as the Schwarz genus of the map $p: PX\to X\times X$ where $PX$ denotes the path space of $X$, mapping a path $\alpha \in PX$ to the pair $(\alpha(0), \alpha(1))$. The author notes that a real robot has a shape, and hence one loses a lot of information by simply modeling the robot as a point in $X$. In this way, the author suggests to consider not points in $PX$ but frames on a Riemannian manifold. More accurately, we have the following motion problem (the author calls it the oriented motion problem): Given an oriented Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ where $g$ denotes the metric, let $F(M,g)$ denote the family of all positive orthonormal frames of tangent spaces of $(M,g)$. For any two points $(x,y)\in M$ and positive orthonormal bases $B_x$ for $T_xM$ and $B_y$ for $T_yM$, find a path $\gamma \in P(F(M,g))$ that joins $\gamma(0) = B_x$ with $\gamma(1) = B_y$. The author considers the invariant $\text{TC}(F(M,g))$ (it depends on $M$ only and, in fact, does not depend on $g$), and notes that this invariant provides the above mentioned desired formalization that takes into account the \textit{shape} of a robot. This idea is the main contribution of the paper. Furthermore, the author makes some calculations of $\text{TC}(F(M,g))$, via a more or less standard technique.

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