The objective of this tutorial is to introduce the broad bioinformatics and computational biology community of students and researchers that attend ACM BCB to robotics-inspired treatments and methodologies put forth by robotics researchers for the purpose of understanding and elucidating the role of structure and dynamics in the biological function of key macromolecules, such as proteins and RNA. This community has now gained enough maturity, and a rich body of literature is now available, attesting to the efficacy of robotics-inspired methods for biomolecular modeling.

The tutorial will be organized in three parts:

• Part A: Present current understandings and limitations therein on the role of biomolecular structure and dynamics. Introduce analogies between articulated robotic chains and biomolecular chains.
• Part B: Setup robot motion planning problem, and summarize roadmap- and tree-based robot motion planning methods. The summary will be focused on methods whose adaptations for biomolecules have had most success.
• Part C: Highlight 3-4 representative methods and their applications on diverse structure and motion modeling of proteins, ligand, and RNA.