Robot navigation example

Fig. 3 shows a robot navigation application. This was inspired by an installation of G2 at the Robotics Technology Group at the Savannah River Laboratory. The robots in the example seek the shortest path toward one of the "goals." The user can connect and disconnect the nodes of the example, and G2 will understand if the path exists between the nodes. The animation feature of G2 is used to move the robots during the scenario. The use of robots in a nuclear plant is primarily intended to avoid sending humans into hazardous environments. There are many examples in conventional chemical plants where a similar use of robots would be well justified. 

To make our discussion more concrete, we briefly present two examples of deployed CIS systems ROBODOC (Integrated Surgical Systems, Davis, California) an active medical robotics system, and the StealthStation (Medtronic Surgical Navigation Technology, Boulder, Colorado), an intraoperative navigation system used in neurosurgery and orthopedics. 

One of the drawbacks of navigation systems is that they cannot guarantee that a planned surgical gesture, such as screw placement or needle insertion, will be executed precisely as planned. To ensure not only precise positioning but also precise execution, surgical robots have been developed. We describe next two examples of the most common types of active surgical robots the ROBODOC system discussed earlier and the LARS robot for percutaneous therapy. 

A system s behavior may be represented by more than one of these descriptions. A domestic example of such a system, iRobot s Roomba line of robotic vacuum cleaners, illustrates how prosaic automation and autonomy have become. The Roomba must navigate a house full of obstacles while ensuring that the carpet is cleaned—a challenging task for a consumer product. We can evaluate the Roomba s characteristics using the definitions given above ... 

Another alternative for mobile robotic applications consists in taking advantage from the Wireless Sensor Network paradigm as a complementary infrastructure allowing for acquiring additional knowledge aboutthe environment. The idea is to feed the robots with additional cyberphysical information that can be carried out by the WSN, which provides substantial support to the robotic system to accomplish its missions. As a consequence, the performance will naturally improve. As an illustrative example, a WSN can afford localization services for robots to support its navigation in an indoor environment, in a... 

An example of a hierarchically structured robot collective is the system developed by Seib et al. (2011). In that robot collective consisting of two robots, the Apex robot performed the role of instructing a Subordinate robot to navigate an unknown environment, with the objective of cleaning the environment. The Subordinate robot was imbued with minimal intelligence and the robot collective relied on the Apex robot s abilities to develop a SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) (Durrant-White Bailey, 2006)... 

The Figure 11 illustrates an example of an environment with some obstacles where the robot must navigate. In this environment, Ihe robot is located initially at point PI and the objective is to reach the point P4. The trajectory generating system must be supplied by Cartesian points PI, P2, P3, and P4, which are Ihe main points of the traced route. 

This system is particularly interesting and can be used, for example, in robotic soccer games, where the navigation strategies are made from images of the environment (soccer field), and the obstacles (robot players). With this system, the best trajectory can be defined and traced, respecting always the kinematic, holonomic, or nonholo-nomic constraints of the robotic systems in question. The system is able to carry out all the... 

Figure 11. Example of an environment with some obstacles where the robot must navigate...

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