Page 10 - Designing Autonomous Mobile Robots : Inside the Mindo f an Intellegent Machine
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Contents

                   Chapter 6: Communications and Control .................................................. 77
                       Popular networks ............................................................................................ 77
                       Rigid protocols and other really bad ideas ..................................................... 81
                       Flexible protocols ........................................................................................... 85

                       Communications architectures ...................................................................... 88
                       Wrappers, layers, and shells ........................................................................... 89
                       Drivers, OCXs and DLLs ............................................................................... 93
                       Improving communications efficiency........................................................... 95
                       Timing issues and error handling ................................................................... 99
                       Other issues .................................................................................................. 103


               SECTION 2 – Basic Navigation ..................................................... 105

                   Chapter 7: Basic Navigation Philosophies................................................ 107
                       The academic school of thought .................................................................. 107
                       The industrial school of thought ................................................................. 109
                       Area coverage robots .................................................................................... 109
                       Virtual path following vs. goal seeking ........................................................ 111
                       A practical starting point and “a priori” knowledge.................................... 115


                   Chapter 8: Live Reckoning ....................................................................... 117
                       Understanding why good dead reckoning is crucial .................................... 120
                       Picking coordinate systems .......................................................................... 121
                       Tick calculations........................................................................................... 122
                       Live reckoning interaction with other processes......................................... 126

                   Chapter 9: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Machines ............................. 127

                       Path planning and execution ....................................................................... 128
                       Are we there yet?.......................................................................................... 130
                       Running on................................................................................................... 132
                       Bread crumbs and irregular path following .................................................. 132
                       The Z axis, maps, and wormholes ................................................................ 134
                       Summary ....................................................................................................... 135





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