[comp.ai.digest] What My Robot Should Do Next - Ian Horswill

MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM (Marc Vilain) (10/18/88)

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

       WHAT MY ROBOT SHOULD DO NEXT: NAVIGATION WITHOUT PLANNING;
                     VISION WITHOUT INVERSE-OPTICS.

                            Ian D. Horswill
                    MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
                       (IDH@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Tuesday October 25


In this talk I will discuss a system which performs a variety of
low-level navigation activities without many of the traditional
trappings of robot navigation such as mapping, planning, callibrated
cameras, surface reconstruction, or dead reconning.  In particular, the
system chases moving objects, investigates static ones, and follows
along corridors using a camera for visual feedback.

Rather than committing to a pre-planned path and attempting to follow
it accurately, the system constantly re-answers the question "what
should I do next?".  By continuously reasessing the situation, the
system is able to operate in dynamic and even unpredictable
environments where mapping and planning are unfeasible.  By breaking
the problem up into managable routine tasks such as corridor
following, the system is able to perform the tasks using dramatically
simpler machinery than conventional systems while guaranteeing bounded
response time (0.2 seconds in our present implementation).
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