Projective product coverings and sequential motion planning algorithms in real projective spaces

Abstract: For positive integers $m$ and $s$, let $\mathbf{m}s$ stand for the $s$-th tuple $(m,\ldots,m)$. We show that, for large enough $s$, the higher topological complexity $TC_s$ of an even dimensional real projective space $RP^m$ is characterized as the smallest positive integer $k=k(m,s)$ for which there is a $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^{s-1}$-equivariant map from Davis' projective product space $P{\mathbf{m}_s}$ to the $(k+1)$-th join-power $((\mathbb{Z}_2)^{s-1})^{\ast(k+1)}$. This is a (partial) generalization of Farber-Tabachnikov-Yuzvinsky's work relating $TC_2$ to the immersion dimension of real projective spaces. In addition, we compute the exact value of $TC_s(RP^m)$ for $m$ even and $s$ large enough.