Someof the geometric problemsof interest to molecular biologists havemacroscopicanaloguesin the field of robotics. Twoexamples of such analogies are those between protein docking and model-basedperception, and betweenring closure and inverse kinematics. Moleculardynamicssimulation, too, has muchin commonwith the study of robot dynamics. In this paper wegive a brief survey of recent workon these and related problems.
David Parsons, John F. Canny