On Robotics Scenarios and Modeling with Fibered Structures

The field of robotics has been one of the main working areas of the RISC-Linz group in the MEDLAR project. In the first project year of BRA 3125 (subsequently referred to as MEDLAR I) we started with case studies (Pfalzgraf and Stokkermans 1992) in order to get an overview of material which we considered to be relevant as support and motivation of future project work. These future aspects are especially seen with regard to the applications of methods developed by the other project partners. Therefore it became more and more clear that one of the main objectives of our work on robotics has to do with the construction of “scenarios” where various reasoning methods can be applied and tested and extended. That means that we thought of providing testbeds where each partner should be able to identify a problem suitable for application of her/his corresponding methods, respectively. This would describe the ideal case. Subsequently, in the next section, we will go into more details. Actually, the development of these ideas started in the course of MEDLAR I and they found enough interest as to be continued in the first year of MEDLAR II (BRP 6471), the project successor of MEDLAR I. The existing material is intended to serve as a basis for work on parts of a MEDLAR practical reasoner (in the third year). In our case this refers to a reasoning module for specific robotics problems which corresponds to our special fields of interest namely algebraic approaches to geometric reasoning problems with emphasis on robot kinematics and singularity problems.