Rapid, High Precision Control in Tightly Constrained Environments

The basic control loop of a robot is as follows: read in sensor data about the environment, perform some calculation, send velocity commands to the robot motors, and repeat. The calculations in between reading sensor data and sending commands to the motors reflect the behavior of the robot that we want. In each loop, we will calculate the new velocity commands with the aim that these new commands will result in the desired behavior. However, how to translate the sensor data that comes in to the velocity commands that go out is sometimes unclear.