Manchester Geometry Seminar 2005/2006

Imagine that you want to extend your hand to pick up a coffee cup from your desk. To make this intention work your arm muscles must be involved in a very complicated coordinated motion. Problems of this kind appear in robotics where one needs to design control mechanisms (algorithms) for large mechanical systems (robots). The word "large" here means that the configuration space of the system is a high dimensional manifold. In my talk I will discuss some new interesting topological problems inspired by the Robot Motion Planning problem.