Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations

Robot motion planning has become a major focus of robotics. Research findings can be applied not only to robotics but also to planning routes on circuit boards, directing digital actors in computer graphics, robot-assisted surgery and medicine, and in novel areas such as drug design and protein folding. This text reflects the great advances that have taken place in the last ten years, including sensor-based planning, probabilistic planning, localization and mapping, and motion planning for dynamic and nonholonomic systems. Its presentation makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible to students of computer science and engineering, relating low-level implementation details to high-level algorithmic concepts.