Pii: S0921-8890(98)00069-4

Basic cycles, utility and opportunism in self-sufficient robots

Self-suucient and autonomous robots necessarily make their own decisions. As designers of robots we need ways of assessing their behaviour. A functional method, called the basic cycle which is based on the utility of the robot owner, is proposed to assess the robot's performance within an environmental niche. The method allows judgements to be made on the robot's use of time or energy, as well ...

A simple approach to the control of locomotion in self-reconfigurable robots

In this paper we present role-based control which is a general bottom-up approach to the control of locomotion in self-reconfigurable robots. We use role-based control to implement a caterpillar, a sidewinder, and a rolling track gait in the CONRO self-reconfigurable robot consisting of eight modules. Based on our experiments and discussion we conclude that control systems based on role-based c...

Biomimetic robot navigation

In the past decade, a large number of robots has been built that explicitly implement biological navigation behaviours. We review these biomimetic approaches using a framework that allows for a common description of biological and technical navigation behaviour. The review shows that biomimetic systems make significant contributions to two fields of research: First, they provide a real world te...

Scientific methods in mobile robotics

Navigation using natural landmarks