Wednesday July 27/4:30
MS37/Harbor 1
Robot Kinematics
Kinematics is the study of motion, particularly the motions of bodies geometrically constrained by their contacts with one another. The field of robotics has engendered many new connections between kinematics and mathematics. The speakers in this minisymposium will present an overview of several topics in robot kinematics that should be of interest to applied mathematicians. The topics to be discussed include geometric issues relating to nonholonomic kinematic constraints, recent advances in methodology for inferring robot kinematic models from measurements, how the curvature of surfaces in contact affects the mobility of an object grasped by a robot hand, and new techniques for solving sparse systems of algebraic equations like those which often arise in kinematic studies.
Organizer: Charles W. Wampler
General Motors Research and Development Center
- 4:30: Geometric Problems in Planning the Dynamics of Movement
John Baillieul, Boston University
- 5:00: Autonomous Robot Calibration
John M. Hollerbach, McGill University, Canada
- 5:30: A Second Order Mobility Theory and Its Applications
Elon Rimon and Joel W. Burdick, California Institute of Technology
- 6:00: Sparse Resultants: A Brief Introduction and Their Application to Kinematics
John F. Canny, University of California, Berkeley