Homework 1 - Deliberative Robotics Paradigm
Due Thursday, January 31, 2008
NOTE: This assignment, like others in this class, is due at the
beginning of the class period. This means that if you are
even a minute late, you lose 20%. If you are worried about
potentially being late, turn in your homework ahead of time.
Do this by submitting them to me during office hours or by sliding it
under my office door. Do not send assignments to me through email or
leave them in my departmental mail box.
In class we discussed the following three related items (among
others):
- The fact that the Mowforth & Grant paper could be seen as an
example of the deliberative robotics paradigm, also known variously as
the hierarchical paradigm (by Murphy), the functional modules approach,
or the traditional decomposition.
- Examples of the functional modules that could go into a robot in
the deliberative paradigm.
- The fact that authors did not typically start from a definition of
the deliberative robotics paradigm and attempt to design particular
systems to fit within that definition. Instead we discussed the fact
that researchers typically designed systems to work, and those systems
were later classified by textbook authors such as Murphy as falling
into one or another of a few broad categories or paradigms, but that
such categorization may work better or worse for particular
systems.
Here we will attempt to put several of these ideas together.
The assignment.
Consider the Mowforth & Grant paper. As we are considering it
to be an example of the functional modules approach, describe:
- the different modules of Mowforth & Grant’s system,
- how each module functions,
- how the modules are pipelined together, and
- how they are different from and similar to the modules that we
discussed in class as the stereotypical functional modules of the
traditional decomposition.
What to turn in.
Turn in a typed copy of your descriptions for this assignment. In
total, your descriptions should run from 1.5 to 2 pages in length
(roughly 80 characters per line, 50 lines per page). This does not
count any figures that you may choose to include, which may be of any
size.