Mobile Robot . org

Software: The Final Frontier

Watershed

Although robots have been the subject of popular interest and enthusiasm for over 50 years, real robots have not yet lived up to these hopes and expectations.

However, there have been dramatic improvements over the past decade in some of the supporting technologies, removing some of the impediments to developing advanced mobile robots.

There was a time...

...when you needed a million dollars if you required a serious computer for robotics research.  The computer system consumed vast amounts of power and occupied a large air-conditioned room with special raised flooring.  Performance was measured in thousands of operations per second, and there wasn't enough main memory to contain one low resolution image.  Graphics was generated on a pen plotter.

Today...

...the pervasive laptop provides a small, lightweight, inexpensive, portable, powerful computing solution with very large memory capacities.

More powerful processors and larger memories are becoming available every day.  Mobile computers are becoming smaller and lighter.

Excellent compilers and software development tools for these computer systems are readily available at very low cost.

Not so long ago...

...television cameras were large, expensive, and heavy.  Interfaces with fast A/D to convert interlaced analog video into digital data had not yet been developed.  Other sensors such as laser rangefinders and GPS did not yet exist.

Now...

...small, inexpensive digital video cameras that interface directly to computers provide high-quality progressive scan image sequences in real time.

A wide variety of other inexpensive sensors, such as position encoders, ultrasound rangefinders, accelerometers, thermal sensors, and GPS all provide a wealth of data.

Even in the very beginning,

the electromechanical technology to produce mobile robots that can move effectively in different environments was available.

Now,

as embedded digital control becomes more pervasive, computer interfacing and control in many cases has become almost trivial.

The Software Barrier

With so many other limitations falling by the wayside, the lack of robotics algorithms that are effective in a wide variety of situations and environments continues to be the single most significant barrier to the development of successful mobile robots.

Current mobile robots tend to only work well in highly constrained environments. They have a very limited capability to function successfully when in the presence of significant unknowns.