Foraging Robots

Glossary Autonomy In robotics autonomy conventionally refers to the degree to which a robot is able to make its own decisions about which actions to take next. Thus a fully autonomous robot would be capable of carrying out its entire mission or function without human control or intervention. A semi-autonomous robot would have a degree of autonomy but require some human supervision. Behaviour-based control Behaviour-based control describes a class of robot control systems characterised by a set of conceptually independent task achieving modules, or behaviours. All task achieving modules are able to access the robot's sensors and when a particular module becomes active it is able to temporarily take control of the robot's actuators [2]. Braitenburg vehicle In robotics a Braitenburg vehicle is a conceptual mobile robot in which simple sensors are connected directly to drive wheels. Thus if, for instance, a front-left-side sensor is connected to the right-side drive wheel and vice-versa, then if the sensors are light sensitive the robot will automatically steer towards a light source [11]. Finite State Machine In the context of this article a finite state machine (FSM) is a model of robot behaviour which has a fixed number of states. Each state represents a particular set of actions or behaviours. The robot can be in only one of these states at any given instant in time and transitions between states may be triggered by either external or internal events.