Characterizing the Optimal Motion of an Object Among Obstacles.

Motion planning or the problem of planning a path for a robot is a fundamental problem arising in the fields of robotics and industrial automation. In particular, considerable attention has been given to the following problem: Find a continuous motion for a robot between two specified positions which avoids collision with the obstacles in its environment. Also of interest is the problem of finding the shortest collision-free path between two given positions. In this paper, we address the problem of finding the shortest path for a ladder in the plane. The distance measure we consider is the length of the path traversed by a single reference point on the ladder, perhaps an endpoint. We describe a detailed characterization of an optimal path and provide insight into algorithms for solving this problem.