TABLE OF CONTENTS Today the mobile robotics field receives great attention. There is a wide range of industrial applications of autonomous mobile robots, including robots for automatic floor cleaning in buildings and factories, for mobile surveillance systems, for transporting parts in factories without the need for fixed installations, and for fruit collection and harvesting. These mobile robot applications are beyond the reach of current technology and show the inadequacy of traditional design methodologies. Several new control approaches have been attempted to improve robot interaction with the real world aimed at the autonomous achievement of tasks. An example is the subsumption architecture proposed by Brooks which supports parallel processing and is modular as well as robust. This approach is one of the first solutions systematically implemented on real robots with success. Other researchers propose new computational approaches like fuzzy logic or artificial NNs.
The interest in mobile robots is not only directed toward industrial applications. Several biologists, psychologist and ethologists are interested in using mobile robots to validate control structures observed in the biological world. Franceschini uses a robot to validate the structure of the retina observed on a y, Beer to replicate the mechanism that coordinates leg movements in walking insects, Deneubourg to get a better understanding of collective behavior in ant colonies. All these research activities are based on mobile robot experimentation. A simpler way to validate control algorithms is to use simulations, but the simplifications involved are too important for...
