Page 71 - Designing Autonomous Mobile Robots : Inside the Mindo f an Intellegent Machine

Chapter 4

the robot had pointed its camera at the threat and recorded a video clip as part of its
alarm report. When I downloaded the clip, I saw the culprit. There, on the very edge of
the gas dome was an overhead gas heater with its pilot light burning. The console had
actually announced the alarm stating that it was from gas with a strong flame contribu-
tion, but since the officer could not smell the gas, and didn’t think of the heater as a
flame, he had dismissed the threat.

Summary

There are many ways to control the weighting in a fuzzy logic inference engine. It is
important to think of fuzzy logic as a mathematical process that can be embedded in-
to larger structures, rather than a stand-alone discipline.
This humble mathematical process can provide very impressive decision making
when it is properly employed in conjunction with other techniques. In the chapters
to come, we will see how merging fuzzy logic with modeling and other concepts can
produce spookily powerful results.

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