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You're reading from  Artificial Intelligence for Robotics - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inMar 2024
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781805129592
Edition2nd Edition
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Francis X. Govers III
Francis X. Govers III
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Francis X. Govers III

Francis X. Govers III is an Associate Technical Fellow for Autonomy at Bell Textron, and chairman of the Textron Autonomy Council. He is the designer of over 30 unmanned vehicles and robots for land, sea, air, and space, including RAMSEE, the autonomous security guard robot. Francis helped lead the design of the International Space Station, the F-35 JSF Fighter, the US Army Future Combat Systems, and telemetry systems for NASCAR and IndyCar. He is an engineer, pilot, author, musician, artist, and maker. He received five outstanding achievement awards from NASA and recognition from Scientific American for World Changing Ideas. He has a Master of Science degree from Brandeis University and is a veteran of the US Air Force.
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Summary

This chapter introduced some concepts for robot navigation in an unstructured environment, which is to say, in the real world, where the designers of the robot don’t have control over the content of the space. We started by introducing SLAM, along with some of the strengths and weaknesses of map-based navigation. We talked about how Roomba navigates, by random interaction and statistical models. The method selected for our toy-gathering robot project, Albert, combined two algorithms that both relied mostly on vision sensors.

The first was the Floor Finder, a technique I learned when it was used by the winning entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Floor Finder algorithm uses the near vision (next to the robot) to teach the far vision (away from the robot) what the texture of the floor is. We can then divide the room into things that are safe to drive on, and things that are not safe. This deals with our obstacle avoidance. Our navigation technique used a trained...

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Artificial Intelligence for Robotics - Second Edition
Published in: Mar 2024Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781805129592

Author (1)

author image
Francis X. Govers III

Francis X. Govers III is an Associate Technical Fellow for Autonomy at Bell Textron, and chairman of the Textron Autonomy Council. He is the designer of over 30 unmanned vehicles and robots for land, sea, air, and space, including RAMSEE, the autonomous security guard robot. Francis helped lead the design of the International Space Station, the F-35 JSF Fighter, the US Army Future Combat Systems, and telemetry systems for NASCAR and IndyCar. He is an engineer, pilot, author, musician, artist, and maker. He received five outstanding achievement awards from NASA and recognition from Scientific American for World Changing Ideas. He has a Master of Science degree from Brandeis University and is a veteran of the US Air Force.
Read more about Francis X. Govers III