Vladimir Tucakov, Michael Sahota, Don Murray, Alan Mackworth,
Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
Jim Little, Stewart Kingdon, Cullen Jennings, Rod Barman
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, CANADA V6T 1Z4
tucakov@cs.ubc.ca 604-822-6625 604-822-5485 FAX
Abstract
Our mobile robot, Spinoza, embodies a sophisticated real-time vision system for control of a mobile robot in a dynamic environment. The complexity of our robot architecture arises from the wide variety of tasks that need to be performed and the resulting challenge of coordinating multiple distributed, concurrent processes on a diverse range of processor architectures including Transputers, digital signal processors, and a workstation host. The system handles sensing, reasoning, and action components of a robot distributed over these architectures, and responds to unpredictable events in an unknown dynamic environment. Spinoza relies heavily on its capability to perform real-time vision processing in order to perform task such as mapping, navigation, exploration, tracking, and simple manipulation.