
238 Chapter 13 • Knowing Where You Are
There are other possibilities. People have suggested using bar codes on the
floor:When the robot finds one, it aligns and reads it, decoding its position from
the value. Others tried complex grids made out of stripes of different colors.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple solution valid for all cases, and you will very
likely be forced to use some dead reckoning after a landmark to improve the
search.
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Making a Gradient Pad
To print a gradient pad with a single attractor A simply make the dark-
ness (or brightness) of any point proportional to its distance from A. If
ax and ay are the coordinates of ...