The space of sections of a smooth function

Abstract: Given a compact manifold $X$ with boundary and a submersion $f : X \rightarrow Y$ whose restriction to the boundary of $X$ has isolated critical points with distinct critical values and where $Y$ is $[0,1]$ or $S^1$, the connected components of the space of sections of $f$ are computed from $\pi_0$ and $\pi_1$ of the fibers of $f$. This computation is then leveraged to provide new results on a smoothed version of the evasion path problem for mobile sensor networks: From the time-varying homology of the covered region and the time-varying cup-product on cohomology of the boundary, a necessary and sufficient condition for existence of an evasion path and a lower bound on the number of homotopy classes of evasion paths are computed. No connectivity assumptions are required.