What you will learn

Not all of the chapters or topic in this book are considered classical AI approaches, but they do represent different ways of approaching machine learning and decision-making problems.

Building a firm foundation for robot control by understanding control theory and timing.  We will be using a soft real-time control scheme with what I call a frame-based control loop.  This technique has a fancy technical name – rate monotonic scheduling—but I think you will find the concept fairly intuitive and easy to understand.

At the most basic level, AI is a way for the robot to make decisions about its actions. We will introduce a model for decision making that comes from the US Air Force, called the OODA (Observe- Orient-Decide- Act) loop.  Our robot will have two of these loops: an inner loop or introspective loop, and an outward looking environment sensor loop.  The lower, inner loop takes priority over the slower, outer loop, just as the autonomic parts of your body (heartbeat, breathing, eating) take precedence over your task functions (going to work, paying bills, mowing the lawn).  This makes our system a type of subsumption architecture in Chapter 2, Setting Up Your Robot, a biologically inspired control paradigm named by Rodney Brooks of MIT, one of the founders of iRobot and designer of a robot named Baxter.

The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd, a man also called The Father of the F-16.  Col. Boyd's ideas are still widely quoted today, and his OODA loop is used to describe robot artificial intelligence, military planning, or marketing strategies with equal utility.  The OODA provides a model for how a thinking machine that interacts with its environment might work.

Our robot works not by simply doing commands or following instructions step by step, but by setting goals and then working to achieve these goals. The robot is free to set its own path or determine how to get to its goal.  We will tell the robot to pick up that toy and the robot will decide which toy, how to get in range, and how to pick up the toy.  If we, the human robot owner, instead tried to treat the robot as a teleoperated hand, we would have to give the robot many individual instructions, such as move forward, move right, extend arm, open hand, each individually and without giving the robot any idea of why we were making those motions.

Before designing the specifics of our robot and its software, we have to match its capabilities to the environment and the problem it must solve.   The book will introduce some tools for designing the robot and managing the development of the software.  We will use two tools from the discipline of systems engineering to accomplish this – use cases and storyboards.  I will make this process as streamlined as possible.  More advanced types of systems engineering are used by NASA and aerospace companies to design rockets and aircraft – this gives you a taste of those types of structured processes.