Page 126 - Designing Autonomous Mobile Robots : Inside the Mindo f an Intellegent Machine

Basic Navigation Philosophies

There are many ways to solve any one problem, but the trick is to create systems that
economically solve the problem reliably for multiple environments with the least expensive,
lowest power, and most reliable sensor systems possible.

The industrial school of thought

The industrial school of thought is diametrically opposed to the academic school.
This view is often verbalized as KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Many in this school
believe that if a guidance system works well by following a physical path, then why
bother with all that fancy navigation nonsense. There are, in fact, applications
where these old technologies have sufficed for decades.
People of the industrial school are business people who see themselves as providing
solutions to customer problems. They understand that the cost of development is
very high, and that the return for such investment is often insufficient. Unfortunately,
for those who prescribe too rigidly to this school, recent techno-history has clearly
shown that sitting still is an ever more risky survival strategy. The inherent rigidity
of physical path systems makes them potentially vulnerable to more flexible and
capable autonomous systems.

Similarly, in the case of emergency response and bomb disposal robots, there is likely
to be an evolution toward systems that make the remote operator’s job easier and the
robot safer. The simple addition of collision avoidance sensors and reflexive behav-
iors could make these robots safer and easier to drive. Such improvements would
also reduce the required operator training costs, allowing more cross training with
other jobs. There is absolutely no technical barrier to this approach, but most of the
manufacturers in this field are still producing robots with little or no automatic
capability.

In the end, the competition between these schools of thought will be settled in the
marketplace on an application-by-application basis. The result overall will most
probably be systems that are increasingly easier to install and more flexible, while
becoming less and less expensive. It is unlikely that the whole market will wait for
the perfect robot, and then burst upon it in wild enthusiasm.

Area coverage robots

Area coverage robots for applications such as lawn mowing and vacuum cleaning
have already been marketed for years with various degrees of success. These devices

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