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Contents: Part I
Overview
Chapter 1: From Teleoperation to Autonomy

Chapter 2: The Hierarchical Paradigm

Chapter 3: Biological Foundations of the Reactive Paradigm
Chapter 4: The Reactive Paradigm

Chapter 5: Designing a Reactive Implementation

Chapter 6: Common Sensing Technique for Reactive Robots
Chapter 7: The Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Paradigm

Chapter 8: Multiple Mobile Robots

Overview

The eight chapters in this part are devoted to describing what is AI robotics
and the three major paradigms for achieving it. These paradigms character-
ize the ways in which intelligence is organized in robots. This part of the
book also covers architectures that provide exemplars of how to transfer the
principles of the paradigm into a coherent, reusable implementation on a
single robot or teams of robots.

What Are Robots?
One of the first questions most people have about robotics is “what is a ro-
bot?” followed immediately by “what can they do?”
In popular culture, the term “robot” generally connotes some anthropo-
morphic (human-like) appearance; consider robot “arms” for welding. The
tendency to think about robots as having a human-like appearance may stem
from the origins of the term “robot.” The word “robot” came into the popu-
lar consciousness on January 25, 1921, in Prague with the first performance
of Karel Capek’s play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). 37 In R.U.R., an
unseen inventor, Rossum, has created a race of workers made from a vat of
biological parts, smart enough to replace a human in any job (hence “univer-
sal”). Capek described the workers as robots, a term derived from the Czech