Objectives

• Objective 1: Development of methodology of motion synthesis that distinguishes between the topology of the object from the detailed geometry using the former to reduce the complexity of problems solved in the latter space.


• Objective 2: Embedding of this methodology in several robotic systems of variable topology involving sophisticated visual sensing and state of the art manipulation systems; and develop control strategies for animated characters.


• Objective 3: Understanding how people solve such problems, with the goal of trying to inform representations and problem formulation, and also to suggest primitives that will be used at the lower-level control system.


• Objective 4: Embedding of these methodologies in state-of-the-art methods for stochastic optimal control and planning under uncertainty aiming towards a coherent integrated planning and motion control system coupling representations on all levels of abstraction.


• Objective 5: Development of methods that relate task topology with object features to end-effector/manipulator synthesis, leading to development of metamorphic end-effector/manipulator with variable topology.