On the Movement of Robot Arms in Two Dimensional Bounded Regions

Abstract

The classical mover's problem is the following: can a rigid object in 3-dimensional space be moved from one given position to another while avoiding obstacles? It is known that a more general version of this problem involving objects with movable joints is PSPACE complete, even for a simple tree-like structure moving in a 3-dimensional region. In this paper, we investigate a 2-dimensional mover's problem in which the object is a robot arm with an arbitrary number of joints. In particular, we give a polynomial time algorithm for moving an arm confined within a circle from one given configuration to another. We also give a polynomial time algorithm for moving the arm from its initial position to a position in which the end of the arm reaches a given point within the circle. Keywords: robotics, manipulators, mechanical arms, algorithms, polynomial time.