ROBOT NAVIGATION FUNCTIONS ON MANIFOLDS WITH BOUNDARY

This paper concerns the construction of a class of scalar valued analytic maps on analytic manifolds with boundary. These maps, which we term navigation functions, are constructed on an arbitrary sphere world-a compact connected subset of Euclidean n-space whose boundary is formed from the disjoint union of a finite number of (n - l)-spheres. We show that this class is invariant under composition with analytic diffeomorphisms: our sphere world construction immediately generates a navigation function on all manifolds into which a sphere world is deformable. On the other hand, certain well known results of S. Smale guarantee the existence of smooth navigation functions on any smooth manifold. This suggests that analytic navigation functions exist, as well, on more general analytic manifolds than the deformed sphere worlds we presently consider. © 1990.