Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics

A mobile robot is a combination of various physical (hardware) and computational (software) components. In terms of hardware components, a mobile robot can be considered as a collection of subsystems for:

Locomotion: How the robot moves through its environment

Sensing: How the robot measures properties of itself and its environment

Reasoning: How the robot maps these measurements into actions

Communication: How the robot communicates with an outside operator

Later chapters consider the algorithms and representations that make these capabilities possible, while this chapter concentrates on the underlying hardware, with special emphasis on locomotion for wheeled robots.

Locomotion

locomotionn. (Power of) motion from place to place.

Locomotion is the process by which an autonomous robot or vehicle moves. In order to produce motion, forces must be applied to the vehicle. The study of motion in which these forces are modelled is known as dynamics, while kinematics is the study of the mathematics of motion without considering the forces that affect the motion. That is, kinematics deals with the geometric relationships that govern the system, while dynamics includes the energies and speeds associated with these motions. Here we consider the locomotive strategies of various classes of mobile robots. For wheeled mobile robots, these strategies can often be well described in terms of their kinematics. For legged, space, aquatic, and flying robots, it is usually necessary to consider the locomotive strategies in terms of their dynamics.