A configuration space is used in robotics to help navigate. It is a change of representation which 'grows' objects in the space and treats the robot as a centre point. The objcet growth is chosen so that of the pathis chosen wherby the centre point. avoids the grown objects, then the full robot, with all of its protuberances, will not bump into the actual objects.
Used on pages 342, 343
Configuration space for a triangular robot
Circle-based configuration space