N3RD AL3RT_

We, and I mean all of us existing (with no intention of generalizing), have a tendency to ‘Label’; a genetic habit of trying to place something somewhere within a ‘group’. Why do we do this? As I said it’s genetic.

Not surprisingly, we have a tendency to label even the un-label-able and sometimes label the lables themself (damn those homophobes). Now I could go on about labeling the anti-labelers (antiracist? what about pro-anti-racists?)

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J. J. Leonard and Hugh Durrant-Whyte, in the last decade, briefly described the general problem of mobile robot navigation by three questions: “Where am I?,” “Where am I going?,” and “How should I get there?.”

I was shocked to realize that these 3 basic questions which we, ofcourse take for granted(!) are actually immensely complex implementations in robotic systems.

What I found interesting is that to date there is no truly elegant solution even for the “Where am I?” part! A collection many partial solutions can roughly be categorized into two groups: relative and absolute position measurements. Because of the lack of a single, generally good method, developers of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), unmanned flying vehicles (UAV’s) and mobile robots usually combine two or more methods, one from each category. These two super-groups can be further divided into sub-groups as shows below.

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