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Motion Planning for a Class of Planar Closed-Chain Manipulators

March 23, 2006

  • Date: Thursday, March 23, 2006 
  • Time: 11:00 am — 12:15 pm
  • Place: Woodward 149

Guanfeng Liu (UNM Faculty Candidate)
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

We study the motion planning problem for planar star-shaped manipulators. These manipulators are formed by joining k“legs” to a common point (like the thorax of an insect) and then fixing the “feet” to the ground. The result is a planar parallel manipulator with k-1 independent closed loops. A topological analysis is used to understand the global structure of the configuration space so that planning problem can be solved exactly. The worst-case complexity of our algorithm is O(k3N3), where N is the maximum number of links in a leg. Several examples illustrating our method are given. Finally we show the application of our topological method in the study of the global structure of protein conformation space.