The past two decades have witnessed incredible advances towards the design of autonomous systems. This talk will discuss the role of motion planning in yielding solutions for an agent that is able to execute a variety of tasks in a variety of settings. Problem decomposition has been and remains a difficult task, and motion planning algorithms are today exploited for this purpose. Another critical step is to produce motion from high-level specifications. The specifications declare what the robot must do, rather than how the task is to be done. In that realm, motion planning principles guide the development of new frameworks that integrate advances in logical reasoning and program synthesis. The talk will also illustrate how the experience and insight gained from motion planning are applied to computational structural biology and, in particular, to the design of new therapeutics.
Authors: Lydia Kavraki (Rice University)
