Robotics: Science and Systems VII

Kinematic Cartography for Locomotion at Low Reynolds Numbers

Ross Hatton, Howie Choset

Abstract:

Kinematic motion planning often requires a notion of distance between configurations. Euclidean distances on a parameter space are easy to compute, but can drastically distort the effort required to change configuration. Here, we present a framework for characterizing this distortion, based on principles adopted from the cartographic community, and a method for transforming configuration coordinates to better represent actuation costs. As a demonstration of this approach, we derive a true configuration distance metric for an important class of locomoting systems: low Reynolds number swimmers. Applying our cartographic coordinate transformation to these systems both provides intuition for previous numerical results, and allows direct geometric comparison between systems with heterogeneous morphology.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Hatton-RSS-11, 
    AUTHOR    = {Ross Hatton AND Howie Choset}, 
    TITLE     = {Kinematic Cartography for Locomotion at Low Reynolds Numbers}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2011}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Los Angeles, CA, USA}, 
    MONTH     = {June},
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2011.VII.017} 
}