Page 15 - The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots

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Another reason that robotics is so challenging is that it spans many different disciplines. Suppose that you want to go down in
your basement and build a mobile robot. Without some sort of kit, you'd probably need to take along a team of highly
educated, highly paid engineers, including:

• An electrical engineer chooses the brain, sensors, and maybe the actuators, and wires them all together. This person probably
selects the power supply, as well.

• A mechanical engineer designs the body and possibly selects the actuators. The mechanical person needs to be familiar with
the other components of the robot (brain, sensors, actuators, and power supply) so that everything fits together mechanically.

• A computer programmer writes the software for the robot. This task usually requires intimate knowledge of the brain,
sensors, and actuators that the electronics and mechanical people have chosen.

• For specialized designs, you might even want to have a chemical engineer to select or design the power supply.
It is very rare for a single person to be knowledgeable in all of these fields. Designing a mobile robot, then, is often a
collaborative effort, which makes it even more complex.

Autonomous mobile robots, for the most part, are still confined to the research programs of colleges, universities, and
governments. This research is divided into two camps: the big robot people and the little robot people.

Big Is Beautiful

The big robot people believe that the robot should understand its environment and "think," more or less the same way that a
human does. This is the traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to robotics. In this approach, the robot takes input from
its sensors and tries to build a map of its surroundings. This process alone is very complicated: the robot might use a pair of
video cameras or some more exotic sensors to examine its surroundings, while heavy-duty computers analyze all the sensor
data and attempt to build a map. Finally, in a process called task planning, the robot tries to figure out how it will accomplish
an objective—getting from one point to another, or picking up an object, or some other simple task. In this respect, again, the
robot is expected to think like a human being. The heavy computing requirements of the AI approach consume a lot of power,
which implies a bulky, heavy power supply. Hence, the robot can be pretty big and expensive, too.