A simple, cheap, and robust visual navigation system
Proceedings of the second international conference on From animals to animats 2 : simulation of adaptive behavior: simulation of adaptive behavior
Cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new AI
Cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new AI
Understanding intelligence
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought
Biomimetic Centering for Undulatory Robots
International Journal of Robotics Research
Visual homing for undulatory robotic locomotion
ICRA'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation
In-pipe robot navigation based on the landmark recognition system using shadow images
ICRA'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation
Modeling and path-following for a snake robot with active wheels
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
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Adaptation has become an important aspect of robot design. The work here describes the perception and motion control of MAKRO - an autonomous robot for sewer inspection - from the point of view of MAKRO's adaptation to specific features of the sewer environment. Two features are crucial for MAKRO's adaptation. First, narrow sewer pipes connected into a unified system via junctions, compose a graph-like structure with rather constraint surface geometry. Second, a sewer interior is absolutely dark. The visual sensing of MAKRO is not only well adapted to these specific conditions, in fact it benefits from them. Visual orientation by a hybrid vision system gives rise to a rather simple vision model, which is capable of supporting real time orientation in the sewer. This instantiates an important principle of embodied cognition, which states that adaptation of an agent to an environment allows the use of simple principles of "cheap vision" for navigation purposes. Moreover, a fast visual processing enables MAKRO to react rapidly to events in its surroundings. This in turn, changes our approach to movement control: MAKRO does not act in the "plan - move" fashion; instead, it explores the environment, updates its heading and finds the right direction for the next move in real time. This leads to a second principle of the current work: if visual orientation of an agent operates in real time, all that is required for its successful navigation is to continuously update the right direction of motion. Navigation of MAKRO gives a powerful demonstration of how adaptation to an ecological niche and the exploitation of environmental constraints can lead to extraordinarily robust performance in a mobile robot.