ABSTRACT
Robotics is concerned with the generation of computer-controlled motions of physical objects in a wide variety of settings. Because physical objects define spatial distributions in 3-space, geometric representations and computations play an important role in robotics. As a result the field is a significant source of practical problems for computational geometry. There are substantial differences, however, in the ways researchers in robotics and in computational geometry address related problems. Robotics researchers are primarily interested in developing methods that work well in practice and can be combined into integrated systems. They often pay less attention than researchers in computational geometry to the underlying combinatorial and complexity issues (the focus of Chapter 50). This difference in approach will become clear in the present chapter.
