CA in Robotics

Prof.Dr.Jochen Pfalzgraf
Institut fuer Computerwissenschaften           (Computer Science Institute)
Universitaet Salzburg                          (University of Salzburg)
Jakob Haringer Str. 2
A-5020 Salzburg/Austria

TEL: +43 662 8044-6309  (-6300 = Secretary)
FAX: +43 662 8044- 611
E-mail: jpfalz@cosy.sbg.ac.at

Robotics is a very interdisciplinary area in theoretical research and
development and in industrial applications.  This session of ACA
concentrates on the aspects of symbolic computation (SC) and computer
algebra (CA) deployment in robotics.  Natural applications are symbolic
modeling  of robot arms (kinematic chains) and their computational
treatment by methods of CA.  Typical problems amenable to such CA
approaches are (inverse) kinematics problems and detection of
singularities in robot arm movements (and also singular configurations
in so-called parallel manipulators).  Other challenging problem fields
are (among others) path tracking, obstacle avoidance, finding collision
free paths.  We further mention the very complex problem area of
cooperating robots and production cells.  (The above list is far from
being exhaustive).  CA applications to modeling kinematic chains lead
to hard performance problems when the degree of freedom of a robot arm
increases.  Hybrid approaches, mixing SC with numerical methods, seem
to be promising.

[As a brief information, the session chairman can provide (on request)
a survey article "On Geometric  and Topological Reasoning in Robotics",
"An Application of Grassmann Geometry to a Problem in Robotics" and a
short special note on "Robotics Benchmarks for CA".
E-mail address:   jpfalz@cosy.sbg.ac.at].