Complex sensory data from sonars, lasers, cameras, bumpers etc., as well as operator input must be evaluated and transformed into actions. A sound modelling of the robot system from a mathematical point of view is therefore important. Magnus Egerstedt work on hybrid dynamic systems aims at finding out how these can be used for robotic applications, combining discrete and continuous systems. Another aspect of the complex nature of the robotic systems are how software architectures should be constructed. In this area, Anders Oreb ck is testing a number of current architectures used in robotics, to be able to present a usability study and from that, hopefully, be able to come up with even better solutions.
Path planning Planning a path for a moving robot is a classical problem.
The purpose is to be able to plan a safe path that takes the robot from one position to the next, fulfilling some optimization criteria. The problem becomes even more difficult when an arm is added on top of the robot which is the case with our XR4000 robot. Methods for path planning is studied by Claudio Altafini Multi agent systems Using more than one robot solving a task is a very challenging problem and has attracted attention over the last few years. Currently we are just starting research in this area and we will implement a few task such as cooperative mail delivery and printer output distribution.