THE COMPLEXITY OF PLANAR COMPLIANT MOTION PLANNING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

We consider the computational complexity of planning compliant motions in the plane, given geometric bounds on the uncertainty in sensing and control. We can give efficient algorithms for generating and verifying compliant motion strategies that are guaranteed to succeed as long as the sensing and control uncertainties lie within the specified bounds. We also consider the case where a compliant motion plan is required to succeed over some parametric family of geometries. While these problems are known to be intractable in three dimensions, we identify tractable subclasses in the plane. © 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.