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6 Common Sensing Techniques for Reactive Robots

Figure 6.29 Polly, a visually guided reactive robot using a black and white camera.
(Photograph courtesy of Ian Horswill and AAAI.)

6.8 Case Study: Hors d’Oeuvres, Anyone?

The University of South Florida’s (USF) entry in the 1999 AAAI Mobile Ro-
bot Competition Hors d’Oeuvres, Anyone? event provides a case study of
selecting sensors, constructing reactive behaviors, and using behavioral sen-
sor fusion. The entry used two cooperative robots. The goal was to push the
envelope in robotic sensing by using six different sensing modalities with
40 different physical devices on one robot and four modalities with 23 de-
vices on the other. Although the robots executed under a hybrid delibera-
tive/reactive style of architecture (covered later in Ch. 7), the basic design
process followed the steps in Ch. 5, and produced a largely behavioral sys-
tem. The entry won a Technical Achievement award of Best Conceptual and
Artistic Design after a series of hardware and software timing failures pre-
vented it from working at the competition.