Computational Biology
Motion planning, as its name suggests, plans a path (motion) for a movable object. Even though it originated in, and has mainly been applied to, robotics problems, motion planning as a concept is abstract enough to be applied to any motion related application, ranging from robotics to animation, and most recently to computational biology, chemistry and neuroscience. Our group is investigating applications of probabilistic roadmap (PRM) motion planning methods to protein folding, ligand binding (i.e., drug docking, which arises in drug design), RNA folding, neuroscience, and decoy databases.