Page 191 - Introduction to AI Robotics
P. 191
174
a. 5 Designing a Reactive Implementation
b.
Figure 5.7 Two award-winning Pick Up the Trash competitors: a.) Georgia Tech’s
robots with the trash gripper (photograph courtesy of Tucker Balch and AAAI), and
b.) University of North Carolina’s LOLA (photograph courtesy of Rich LeGrand and
AAAI).
competition required 34 skills and 80 RAPs to do the same task, in part be-
cause of the complexity of the arm. 53;54 Since in general skills lead to a more
complex implementation than FSA and scripts, they will not be covered here.
The most important point to remember in assembling behaviors is to try to
make the world trigger, or release, the next step in the sequence, rather than
rely on an internal model of what the robot has done recently.
5.5.1 Finite state automata
FINITE STATE Finite state automata (FSA) are a set of popular mechanisms for specifying
AUTOMATA what a program should be doing at a given time or circumstance. The FSA
STATE DIAGRAM can be written as a table or drawn as a state diagram, giving the designer a
visual representation. Most designers do both. There are many variants of
