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Michael Farber: "Robot motion planning and equivariant Bredon cohomology" | Einstein Institute of Mathematics

Michael Farber: "Robot motion planning and equivariant Bredon cohomology"

Date: 
Mon, 15/01/201809:00-11:00
Location: 
IIAS, Feldman Building, Givat Ram

Abstract: The motion planning problem of robotics leads to an interesting invariant of topological spaces, TC(X), depending on the homotopy type of X = the configuration space of the system. TC(X) is an integer reflecting the complexity of motion planning algorithms for all systems (robots) having X as their configuration space. Methods of algebraic topology allow to compute or to estimate TC(X) in many examples of practical interest. In the case when the space X is aspherical the number TC(X) depends only on the fundamental group of X. In the talk I will describe some results expressing the topological complexity of aspherical spaces in the case when the fundamental group is hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov.