Fast Navigating Guessing Robots

holy_calamity writes "A new navigation technique for robots allows them to make predictions about what's around the corner based on where they've been already. It works well in repetitive environments like office buildings. If this were a Japanese project I'd say it'd be useful for robotic secretaries new on the job, but since it's an American one I suppose it'll be used for automated SWAT teams."

Comments

Looks like a twist on behavior-based robotics

[EmbeddedJanitor]

This looks like a variant on behavior-based robotics. Instead of just prioritising behavior on sensed conditions, it also prioritises based on expected conditions.

Currently robots really struggle with making good judgement calls. Behvior-based systems only go so far, perhaps this will go one step further.

Re:Looks like a twist on behavior-based robotics

[SnowZero]

No, this is a variant on a common "Simultaneous Localization and Mapping" (SLAM) algorithm that brings in elements similar to Image Completion from the computer graphics community. SLAM is a sensor and sensor interpretation problem, not a behavior/reasoning or action/control problem. While there are probabilistic reasoning systems, the only thing SLAM has in common with them is that it uses conditional probabilities.

If you want to know more, feel free to ask.