designing mobile autonomous robots - john holland

[...]... practical autonomous mobile robot This is as close as we mere mortals can come to producing a living being Make no mistake; we are talking about very primitive beings, but artificial beings nonetheless Autonomous robots exist today that can perform complex tasks without human assistance for weeks or even months, but these robots will seem laughably crude in the years to come The building blocks for autonomous. .. Summary 294 Chapter 19: The Industry, Its Past and Its Future 295 The history of robotics 296 The mobile robotics industry 300 Industry segmentation for autonomous mobile robots 302 The government sector 309 Why aren’t the robots here yet? 318 The future 321 Appendix: Referenced Laws and Formulas 325 Law of Sines and Law... book is about how to organize your approach so that you can begin to create innovative machines that can react to ever-changing conditions to perform useful tasks The difference is that between being an artist, and being great at paint-by-numbers Determinism And why is designing a mobile robot so much more complex than, say, writing an accounting program? In scale it may not be, but the inputs to most... past sequential thinking 209 Thinking of a mobile robot as multiple robot time-places 214 Managing the time dimension 217 Chapter 15: Programming Robots to Be Useful 219 Preprogramming vs teaching paths 219 Embedding data into maps 222 Map interpreters 223 Events and targets 224 Text-based programming 226 Graphical generation... with single-minded persistence our architecture will eventually emerge I will warn of as many traps as I can, but others you will have to find yourself Just remember that you always need a “Plan B.” That is, you must always keep in mind how you will adapt your approach if one or more elements prove flawed Rule-based systems, state-driven systems, and other potential tar pits To some extent, rule-based... scaling The result was that small, inexpensive, low-power processors could perform calculations as complex as linear regression with blazing speed The smaller the microprocessor, the more likely you will need to use assembly language at some point This is particularly true in programming sensor and control systems for mobile robots because this type of real-time programming is not generally well supported... evolved for scientific applications while COBOL became dominant in many early finance applications Basic soon appeared primarily as an easy-to-learn program for the non-geek masses Early versions of Basic violated almost every precept of a good programming disci- 13 Chapter 2 pline, but as time went by new incarnations of the language began borrowing the best ideas from other languages That humble... robots will seem laughably crude in the years to come The building blocks for autonomous robots have been readily available for several years Powerful microprocessors, laser-based sensors (lidar), Ethernet radio communications, video processors, and a host of other subsystems are now priced at levels that permit practical autonomous machines to be built for an exciting range of commercially viable applications... The trade-off between assembly language and higher-level languages is of course efficiency versus development time and code maintainability With processing power as incredibly inexpensive as it is today, only a masochist would program a major application for a PC in assembly language Yet assembly language may yet be the best (and sometimes only) recourse for programming many subsystems of a mobile robot... design of any complex control system with complete confidence xiv What’s on the CD-ROM? Included on the accompanying CD-ROM: ■ A full searchable eBook version of the text in Adobe pdf format ■ A directory containing the sourcecode for all of the example programs in the book Refer to the ReadMe file for more details on CD-ROM content xv Section 1: Background Software Concepts CHAPTER 1 Measure Twice, . alt="" Designing Autonomous Mobile Robots by John Holland AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Designing Autonomous . Elsevier prints its books on acid-free paper whenever possible. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Application submitted.) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue. 295 The history of robotics 296 The mobile robotics industry 300 Industry segmentation for autonomous mobile robots 302 The government sector 309 Why aren’t the robots here yet? 318 The future 321 Appendix: