A flexible and innovative platform for autonomous mobile robots

The development of the CREAL programming language and the STACK hardware platform by the members of the CSAIL Living Machines research group has lead to a foundation upon which roboticists may build and control autonomous mobile robots. This platform, however, has been used only within this research group on a minimal number of projects. As is, there has been no published discussion on the application of CREAL and the STACK to various types of control architectures commonly used in controlling autonomous mobile robots, or any personal accounts of the successes or failures of using such a system on a hand-built robot. In this thesis I focus on these two points. I go into depth on the use and expansion of CREAL to support multiple control architectures, as well as a personal account of the construction and use of a robot that uses these architectures and hardware to accomplish various tasks. The work to be undertaken will describe the process of design, construction, debugging and implementation of a hand-built robot that performs example tasks that are similar in nature to tasks commonly performed by autonomous mobile robots within the robotic research community. Currently, CREAL does not provide any abstract framework to facilitate implementation of neural net architectures by users. The work described in this thesis includes a set of macros that expand the CREAL language to allow user-friendly creation of neural nets. This abstraction framework is then put into use in an implementation that uses the neural net tools developed in order to achieve a fixed goal The second architecture to be discussed is that of subsumption, an architecture that is extremely well suited to be implemented in CREAL.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Howe, Jessica Anne, 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rodney A. Brooks.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17673

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17673