Homework 1 - Deliberative Robotics Paradigm

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.

Consider the following three related items:

1. The fact that the Mowforth & Grant paper could be seen as an example of what Murphy (your textbook author) calls the hierarchical paradigm, which we will call the deliberative paradigm, and also known variously as the functional modules approach or the traditional decomposition.
2. According to Murphy, there are three commonly accepted primitives in robotics: sense, plan, and act. Further, according to Murphy, the "hierarchical" (deliberative) paradigm can be characterized by the robot working its way linearly through these three primitives: first sensing, then planning, then acting.
3. 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.

Consider the Mowforth & Grant paper. As we are considering it to be an example of the deliberative paradigm, describe:

1. the different software components of Mowforth & Grant’s system that relate to sensing, planning, and acting,
2. how each software component functions,
3. which robotic primitive (sense, plan, or act) you believe each component participates in and how it contributes to that primitive,
4. whether or not any components actually participate in more than one robotic primitive,
5. how the components within a primitive interact with one another (for those primitives that have multiple components), and
6. how the components interact with one another between different primitives.

Draw a diagram similar to Figure I.3.a from the Murphy textbook (pg. 7) but with large boxes for the robotic primitives of sense, plan, and act. Within this diagram, place the software components you identified in part 1 of the description above and draw arrows to illustrate parts 5 and 6 of that description. You may refer to this diagram in your description, if you choose to do so.

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 the diagram you are required to include and any additional figures that you may choose to include, which may be of any size.