Complexity of Planning

This is a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Robotics. It is devoted to the study of complexity of complete (or exact) algorithms for robot motion planning. The term complete'' indicates that an approach is guaranteed to find the correct solution (a motion path or trajectory in our setting), or to report that none exists otherwise (in case that for instance, no feasible path exists). Complexity theory is a fundamental tool in computer science for analyzing the performance of algorithms, in terms of the amount of resources they require. (While complexity can express different quantities such as space and communication effort, our focus in this chapter is on time complexity.) Moreover, complexity theory helps to identify hard’’ problems which require excessive amount of computation time to solve. In the context of motion planning, complexity theory can come in handy in various ways, some of which are illustrated here.