Sequential topological complexity of aspherical spaces and sectional categories of subgroup inclusions

Abstract

We generalize results from topological robotics on the topological complexity (TC) of aspherical spaces to sectional categories of fibrations inducing subgroup inclusions on the level of fundamental groups. In doing so, we establish new lower bounds on sequential TCs of aspherical spaces as well as the parametrized TC of epimorphisms. Moreover, we generalize the Costa–Farber canonical class for TC to classes for sequential TCs and explore their properties. We combine them with the results on sequential TCs of aspherical spaces to obtain results on spaces that are not necessarily aspherical.