Mobile Robotics, 2nd Edition

Introduction

A mobile robot can be defined as a mechanical system capable of moving in its environment in an autonomous manner. For that purpose, it must be equipped with:

• – sensors, which will collect knowledge of its surroundings (which it is more or less aware of) and determine its location;
• – actuators, which will allow it to move;
• – an intelligence (or algorithm, regulator), which will allow it to compute, based on the data gathered by the sensors, the commands to send to the actuators in order to perform a given task.

Finally, to this we must add the surroundings of the robot, which correspond to the world in which it evolves, and its mission, which is the task it has to accomplish. Mobile robots are constantly evolving, mainly from the beginning of the 2000s, in military domains (airborne drones [BEA 12], underwater robots [CRE 14], etc.), and even in medical and agricultural fields. They are in particularly high demand for performing tasks considered to be painful or dangerous to humans. This is the case for instance in mine-clearing operations, the search for black boxes of damaged aircraft on the seabed and planetary exploration. Artificial satellites, launchers (such as Ariane V), driverless subways and elevators are examples of mobile robots. Airliners, trains and cars evolve in a continuous fashion towards more and more autonomous systems and will very probably become mobile robots in the following decades.

Mobile robotics is the discipline which looks at the ...