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| Foreword | |
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| What's on the CD-ROM? | |
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| Background Software and Concepts | |
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| Measure Twice, Cut Once | |
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| Determinism | |
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| Rule-based systems, state-driven systems, and other potential tar pits | |
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| Defining an open architecture | |
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| A Brief History of Software Concepts | |
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| Assembly language | |
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| Early conventional languages | |
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| Compilers vs. interpreters | |
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| The GUI revolution | |
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| The great rift | |
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| Object-oriented programming | |
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| Robots and robot subsystems as objects | |
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| Network languages | |
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| The Basics of Real-time Software (For Mere Mortals) | |
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| Threads | |
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| Interrupts and stacks | |
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| Context | |
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| Kernels and tasks | |
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| Task switching | |
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| Interrupt events | |
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| Time slicing | |
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| Reentrance | |
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| Interrupt masking and interrupt priority | |
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| Inter-task communications | |
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| Visual Basic and real-time controls | |
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| VB events | |
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| DoEvents | |
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| Freddy as a VB form | |
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| Modal controls | |
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| Some other tips on using VB for real-time applications | |
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| Setting up a structure | |
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| Creating a library | |
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| Thinking More Clearly Through Fuzzy Logic | |
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| Trapezoidal fuzzy logic | |
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| Fuzzy democracy | |
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| Adaptive fuzzy logic | |
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| Weighting trapezoids in response to other parameters | |
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| Multipass and fratricidal fuzzy logic | |
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| Summary | |
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| Closed Loop Controls, Rabbits and Hounds | |
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| Basic PID controls | |
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| Predictive controls | |
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| Combined reactive and predictive controls | |
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| Various PID enhancements | |
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| Robot drive controls | |
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| Tuning controls | |
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| Rabbits chasing rabbits | |
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| Conclusions | |
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| Communications and Control | |
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| Popular networks | |
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| Rigid protocols and other really bad ideas | |
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| Flexible protocols | |
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| Communications architectures | |
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| Wrappers, layers, and shells | |
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| Drivers, OCXs and DLLs | |
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| Improving communications efficiency | |
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| Timing issues and error handling | |
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| Other issues | |
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| Basic Navigation | |
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| Basic Navigation Philosophies | |
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| The academic school of thought | |
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| The industrial school of thought | |
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| Area coverage robots | |
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| Virtual path following vs. goal seeking | |
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| A practical starting point and "a priori" knowledge | |
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| Live Reckoning | |
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| Understanding why good dead reckoning is crucial | |
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| Picking coordinate systems | |
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| Tick calculations | |
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| Live reckoning interaction with other processes | |
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| The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Machines | |
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| Path planning and execution | |
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| Are we there yet? | |
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| Running on | |
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| Bread crumbs and irregular path following | |
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| The Z axis, maps, and wormholes | |
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| Summary | |
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| Navigation as a Filtering Process | |
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| Filtering for the truth | |
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| The importance of uncertainty | |
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| Modeling uncertainty | |
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| Reducing uncertainty | |
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| Learning to be accurately uncertain | |
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| Uses of uncertainty | |
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| Hard Navigation vs. Fuzzy Navigation | |
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| Sensor data and maps | |
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| Navigation features | |
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| Hard navigation | |
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| The concept of fuzzy navigation | |
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| Other profiles | |
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| The referenced state | |
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| Reducing uncertainty | |
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| Sensors, Navigation Agents and Arbitration | |
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| Sensor types | |
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| Guidelines for selecting and deploying navigation and collision avoidance sensors | |
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| Navigation agents | |
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| Agent properties and methods | |
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| Arbitration and competition among agents | |
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| Who to believe | |
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| Changing one's mind | |
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| Summary | |
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| Instilling Pain, Fear and Confidence | |
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| Pain and annoyance | |
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| Virtual pain | |
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| Avoiding pain and humiliation | |
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| The purpose of virtual confidence | |
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| Calculating virtual confidence | |
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| Summary | |
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| Becoming Unstuck in Time | |
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| Getting past sequential thinking | |
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| Thinking of a mobile robot as multiple robot time-places | |
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| Managing the time dimension | |
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| Programming Robots to Be Useful | |
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| Preprogramming vs. teaching paths | |
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| Embedding data into maps | |
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| Map interpreters | |
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| Events and targets | |
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| Text-based programming | |
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| Graphical generation of text programs | |
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| Conclusions | |
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| Command, Control, and Monitoring | |
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| Unmanaged and self-managed systems | |
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| Ping-pong job management | |
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| Dispatched job management | |
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| Exceptions | |
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| Exception decision making | |
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| Expert assistance | |
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| Status monitoring | |
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| Taking control | |
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| Some GUI rules | |
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| Robustness and context preservation | |
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| Conclusions | |
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| The Law of Conservation of Defects and the Art of Debugging | |
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| The law of conservation of defects | |
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| The art of debugging | |
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| Types of bugs | |
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| Summary | |
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| "What the Hell Happened?" | |
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| Logging | |
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| Data mining using relational techniques | |
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| Incident reporting | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Industry, Its Past and Its Future | |
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| The history of robotics | |
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| The mobile robotics industry | |
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| Industry segmentation for autonomous mobile robots | |
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| The government sector | |
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| Why aren't the robots here yet? | |
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| The future | |
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| Referenced Laws and Formulas | |
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| Law of Sines and Law of Cosines | |
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| Simple 2D Vector Addition | |
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| Linear Regression | |
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| About the Author | |
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| Index | |