
2
1.
Introduction
has retrieved the can, it slowly navigates back to its home
position and deposits its trophy. Finally, the cycle repeats and
the robot ventures forth once again on its quest for cans.
The construction of this robot required us to integrate the
spatial reasoning problems of recognition, manipulation, and
navigation into a complete, operational system. This endeavor
was greatly simplified by the use of a novel distributed control
system. Instead of having a centralized sequential program, the
robot is controlled by a large collection of independent behav-
iors.
Each of these behaviors contains some grain of expertise
concernin ...