Page 198 - Amphibionics : Build Your Own Biologically Inspired Robot

Amphibionics 05 3/24/03 8:44 AM Page 177
Chapter 5 / Serpentronic: Build Your Own Robotic Snake
FIGURE 5.62
Sequence of body
positions during a right
turn.

Infrared Sensor

The next section outlines conditioning the input received by the
infrared sensor. The motion control algorithms and sensor input
routines will then be put together into one main control program.

The infrared software routine will need to take input from the
infrared sensor so that the robot can change its behavior to safe-
ly avoid any obstacles it may encounter while moving through its
environment. A software subroutine will be developed to monitor
the infrared sensor modules, perform signal processing to clean up
any background noise or transient signals to make the information
more useful, and then return results to the robot’s main program.
In this behavior-based method of artificial intelligence, the robot
will continue on with the dominant behavior of exploring, and will
change that course of action immediately based on sensor input.
We want the main program to call the subroutine and have the
subroutine simply return a value of either a 1 or a 0, with 0 indi-

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