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.

In class we discussed the following three related items (among others):

1. 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.
2. Examples of the functional modules that could go into a robot in the deliberative paradigm.
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 functional modules approach, describe:

1. the different modules of Mowforth & Grant’s system,
2. how each module functions,
3. how the modules are pipelined together, and
4. how they are different from and similar to the modules that we discussed in class as the stereotypical functional modules of the traditional decomposition.

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.