PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S, 1 year ago

I know it’s just the meme, but topology actually pops up in robotics. The topology of the configuration space, i.e. what values the variables you can control, like arm angles, linear positions, etc., can actually be used to determine if a certain type of movement is feasible. For example, if your robot’s configuration space has the shape of a torus, you can’t send the robot “into” the torus’s “donut hole”. Physically, this means that to get from one configuration to another, you might have to take some indirect path because the straight path (in configuration space) isn’t physically feasible.