Battling Reality

Abstract

In the four years that the MIT Mobile Robot Project has been in existence, we have built ten robots that focus research in various areas concerned with building intelligent systems. Towards this end, we have embarked on trying to build useful autonomous creatures that live and work in the real world. Many of the preconceived notions entertained before we started building our robots turned out to be misguided. Some issues we thought would be hard have worked successfully from day one and subsystems we imagined to be trivial have become tremendous time sinks. Oddly enough, one of our biggest failures has led to some of our favorite successes. This paper describes the changing paths our research has taken due to the lessons learned from the practical realities of building robots.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1989
Accession Number
ADA220016

Entities

People

  • Anita M. Flynn
  • Rodney A. Brooks

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Actuators
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Circuit Boards
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Computations
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Debugging
  • Detectors
  • Engineering
  • High Level Language Architecture
  • Machines
  • Printed Circuits
  • Range Finding
  • Sensor Fusion

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • Autonomy