Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

What is our robot to do?

Now we are going to do some detailed analysis of what the robot needs to do by using the storyboard process. This works like this: We take each of our two tasks and break them down as completely as we can based on the answers to all of our W questions. Then we make a picture of each step. The pictures can be either a drawing or a word picture (a paragraph) describing what happens in that step.

I like to start the decomposition process by describing the robot in terms of a state machine, which for the first problem may be a good approach to understanding what is going on. You are probably familiar with state machine diagrams, but just in case: a state machine diagram describes the robot’s behavior as a series of discrete ...