Robotics Basics - Representation
Representation is the form in the information is stored in the robot, deciding what and how it is represented. To show how a task or a goal can be performed depending on the information that is being stored in the robot let’s see an example such as navigation. 20210714190242
Example: navigation and world-models
Information about the world is usually called the world model, usually stored as a map. This information is crucial, and allows us to perform many actions that can help the robot on it’s main goal, such as deciding the path to our goal. Also, there is many ways in which we can store the information about the world, and deciding what and how to store it provides many ways to resolve the task of navigation:
- Odometry: remembering the exact path taken (went 3m straight, turned 45 degrees clock-wise, moved another 3m…)
- Landmark based: store sequence of moves on landmarks of the environment (turned left at the first junction, right at the second)
- Topological: store landmarks and the links between them.
- Metric: store the exact length of the place and use it to “draw” the world.
What can a robot store information about
A robot can store information about many different things, or as we said earlier, a robot can have many world-models based on many different things:
- Information about the robot itself
- Information about the environment
- Information about objects in the world
- Information about specific actions
- Information about tasks
It is, however, of vital importance, not only to obtain and store information about different models, but also to keep them accurate and updated. Also, the more information is stored and the more complex it is, the greater the computational cost, so a balance has to be kept to not make tasks very computationally expensive.
Notes References
20210514183815 INDEX - Robotics
20210711200423 Robotics Basics - Control Architectures
20210714190242 Robotics Basics - Navigation