ACA'98

1998 IMACS Conference on Applications of Computer Algebra


Special Session:
Robotics

Session Organizer:

Jochen Pfalzgraf, jpfalz@cosy.sbg.ac.at, Department of Computer Science, University of Salzburg, Jakob Haringer Str 2, A-5020 Salzburg/Austria


Robotics is a very interdisciplinary area in theoretical research and development and in engineering and 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) dynamics, path tracking, obstacle avoidance, finding collision free paths. We further mention the very complex problem area of cooperating and communicating 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.


IMACS ACA'98 Electronic Proceedings