On the Complexity of Optimal Reconfiguration Planning for Modular Reconfigurable Robots
Feili Hou and Wei-Min Shen. On the Complexity of Optimal Reconfiguration Planning for Modular Reconfigurable Robots. In Proc. 2010 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Anchorage, Alaska, USA, May 2010.
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Abstract
This paper presents a thorough analysis of thecomputational complexity of optimal reconfiguration planningproblem for chain-type modular robots, i.e. finding the leastnumber of reconfiguration steps to transform from the initialconfiguration into the goal configuration. It establishes a formalproof that this problem is NP-complete, even if theconfigurations are acyclic. This result gives a compelling reasonthat a polynomial algorithm for optimal reconfiguration plan isunlikely to exist. To facilitate future evaluation ofreconfiguration algorithms, the paper also provides the lowerand the upper bounds for the minimum number ofreconfiguration steps for any given reconfiguration problem.
BibTeX Entry
@InProceedings{hou2010complexity-optimal-reconfiguration-planning, abstract = {This paper presents a thorough analysis of the computational complexity of optimal reconfiguration planning problem for chain-type modular robots, i.e. finding the least number of reconfiguration steps to transform from the initial configuration into the goal configuration. It establishes a formal proof that this problem is NP-complete, even if the configurations are acyclic. This result gives a compelling reason that a polynomial algorithm for optimal reconfiguration plan is unlikely to exist. To facilitate future evaluation of reconfiguration algorithms, the paper also provides the lower and the upper bounds for the minimum number of reconfiguration steps for any given reconfiguration problem.}, address = {Anchorage, Alaska, USA}, author = {Feili Hou and Wei-Min Shen}, booktitle = icra-10, month = may, title = {On the Complexity of Optimal Reconfiguration Planning for Modular Reconfigurable Robots}, year = {2010} }
