Plenary Talk

Motion Planning: Playing with Robots

Erik D. Demaine
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About Erik:

 Has a passion for toys

 Great cook
o He cooks with gadgets
o He uses each of his cooking machines only once

Motion Planning

 Finding geometric motions of robot(s) to achieve task(s) while satisfying constraints

Games as Motion Planning Problems

 Most video games involves a protagonist traversing anenvironment

 Fundamentally
 One robot, one robot at a time, all robots move the same, all robots move independently
Games are Fun/Hard

 Why we study games

o Humans like challenge
Computational Complexity

 Good growth: poly

 Bad: exponential
Gen Strat for Hardness

 known hard problem -> your problem -> algorithm?

One robot games

 Pushing Blocks: Push-1

o Prototypical pushing block game
 Robot can push up to one block at once
 2x2 of blocks is effectively fixed
o Sokoban [thinking rabbit/hiroyuki imabayashi 1984]
 Some blocks are fixed; some you can move
o Push Variants
 Push 1 – one at a time – np hard
 Push 2 – np hard
 Pushpush – 2 – p space complete
 Pushpushpush – 2
 o In sokoban the goal is to store certain objects
 3SAT : Boolean 3-Satisfiability
o NP Complete
o X – T; Y- F; Z – F
 Push - * is NP Hard
o Hoffman 2000
 PushPush-1 is NP-hard in 3D
o O’Rourke & Smith Problem Solving Group 1999
 (Push)Push-1 is NP-hard in 2D
o Demaine , Demaine, O’Rourke 2000
o It’s the end of crossovers – mostly
 We don’t need crossovers anymore!
o