Page 54 - Introduction to AI Robotics

Summary
1.7 1.7 Summary 37
AI robotics is a distinct field, both historically and in scope, from industrial
robotics. Industrial robots has concentrated on control theory issues, particu-
larly solving the dynamics and kinematics of a robot. This is concerned with
having the stationary robot perform precise motions, repetitively in a struc-
tured factory environment. AI robotics has concentrated on how a mobile
robot should handle unpredictable events in an unstructured world. The de-
sign of an AI robot should consider how the robot will represent knowledge
about the world, whether it needs to understand natural language, can it
learn tasks, what kind of planning and problem solving will it have to do,
how much inference is expected, how can it rapidly search its database and
knowledge for answers, and what mechanisms will it use for perceiving the
world.
Teleoperation arose as an intermediate solution to tasks that required au-
tomation but for which robots could not be adequately programmed to han-
dle. Teleoperation methods typically are cognitive fatiguing, require high
communication bandwidths and short communication delays, and require
one or more teleoperators per remote. Telepresence techniques attempt to
create a more natural interface for the human to control the robot and inter-
pret what it is doing and seeing, but at a high communication cost. Supervi-
sory control attempts to delegate portions of the task to the remote, either to
do autonomously (traded control) or with reduced, but continuous, human
interaction (shared control).

1.8 Exercises

Exercise 1.1
List the four attributes for evaluating an architecture. Based on what you know from
your own experience, evaluate MS Windows 95/98/2000 as an architecture for tele-
operating a robot.

Exercise 1.2
Name the three primitives for expressing the components of a robotics paradigm.
Exercise 1.3
Name the three robotic paradigms, and draw the relationship between the primitives.

Exercise 1.4
What is an intelligent robot?