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The assumptions we had to discard are:
- Communication is instantaneous and assured. The
assumption is that robots can exchange all the information they
want or when they want. This is not the case in the real world: wireless
systems are very common now but they rely on either a base station to
forward the message between the robots, or ad-hoc, single hop,
line-of-sight communications. Neither of these is particularly robust
when robots are navigating around obstacles that may block radio waves. In
our case, there is no base station, and no single hop assumption. A
robot relies on teammates to relay messages. This avoids
single points of failure and avoids having to install access points
around the field of operations.
- Actions always perform as predicted. With physical robots,
actions are often unsuccessful: they are not performed as we expect, or are
not performed at all. The key to solving this problem was that each robot
monitor its own actions, so that it could measure progress related to
higher-level intentions and to lower-level reactive tasks.
- Goals are not modified during deliberation or
execution. It is much easier for a robot to consider all its goals
before taking any action, and then to execute the planned
actions. In a real environment, however, goals vary over time and may need to
be modified.
Next: 3 Motivating Scenario
Up: TEAMBOTICA: a robotic framework
Previous: 1 Introduction
Pauline Berry
2002-12-11