Abstract: There are lots of practical reasons why one might attach a tether to a mobile robot (providing power from off-board sources, high-speed communication to a base-station, etc.) but, since the tether constrains the motion of the robot, doing so makes the problem of moving the robot trickier than it would be otherwise. This talk will explore the motion planning problem for a planar robot connected via a cable to a fixed point in R^2. I'll describe how to visualize the configuration space manifold for such a robot, showing that it has regularity which can be used to produce a neat representation. This representation describes the manifold via (1) a discrete structure that characterizes the cable's position (2) an element within a single continuous cell. Further, when the tether has a constraint on its curvature, I'll show how Dubins’s theory of curves can be combined with work on planning with topological constraints to concisely represent the configuration space manifold, resulting in a data-structure that facilitates search for optimal paths. Bio: Dylan Shell is a computer scientist with broad interests. He's an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he runs a laboratory focused on robotics and artificial intelligence. His research group aims to synthesize and analyze complex, intelligent behavior in distributed systems that exploit their physical embedding to interact with the physical world in a variety of ways. He has published papers on multi-robot task allocation, robotics for emergency scenarios, biologically inspired multiple robot systems, multi-robot routing, estimation of group-level swarm properties, minimalist manipulation, rigid-body simulation and contact models, human-robot interaction, and robotic theatre. His work has been funded by DARPA and the NSF; and he has been the recipient of the Montague Teaching award, the George Bekey Service award, and the NSF Career.