Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots . It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence , as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs.
An autonomous underwater vehicle ( AUV ) is a robot that travels underwater without requiring input from an operator. AUVs constitute part of a larger group of undersea systems known as unmanned underwater vehicles , a classification that includes non-autonomous remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) – controlled and powered from the surface by an operator/pilot via an umbilical or using remote control. In military applications a AUV is more often referred to as unmanned undersea vehicle ( UUV ). Underwater gliders are a subclass of AUVs.
Continuous track , also called tank tread or caterpillar track , is a system of vehicle propulsion in which a continuous band of treads or track plates is driven by two or more wheels. This band is typically made of modular steel plates in the case of military vehicles and heavy equipment , or synthetic rubber reinforced with steel wires in the case of lighter agricultural or construction vehicles .
Evolutionary robotics ( ER ) is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to develop controllers and/or hardware for autonomous robots . Algorithms in ER frequently operate on populations of candidate controllers, initially selected from some distribution . This population is then repeatedly modified according to a fitness function . In the case of genetic algorithms (or "GAs"), a common method in evolutionary computation , the population of candidate controllers is repeatedly grown according to crossover, mutation and other GA operators and then culled according to the fitness function . The candidate controllers used in ER applications may be drawn from some subset of the set of artificial neural networks , although some applications (including SAMUEL, developed at the Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence) use collections of "IF THEN ELSE" rules as the constituent parts of an individual controller. It is theoretically possible to use any set of symbolic formulations of a control law (sometimes called a policy in the machine learning community) as the space of possible candidate controllers. Artificial neural networks can also be used for robot learning outside the context of evolutionary robotics. In particular, other forms of reinforcement learning can be used for learning robot controllers.
A robotics simulator is used to create application for a physical robot without depending on the actual machine, thus saving cost and time. In some case, these applications can be transferred onto the physical robot (or rebuilt) without modifications.
A robotics suite is a visual environment for robot control and simulation . They are typically an end-to-end platform for robotics development and include tools for visual programming and creating and debugging robot applications . Developers can often interact with robots through web -based or visual interfaces.
Robot software is the set of coded commands or instructions that tell a mechanical device and electronic system, known together as a robot , what tasks to perform. Robot software is used to perform autonomous tasks. Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.
Developmental robotics ( DevRob ), sometimes called epigenetic robotics , is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines . As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction . The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology , neuroscience , developmental and evolutionary biology , and linguistics , then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
In robotics , a robotic paradigm is a mental model of how a robot operates. A robotic paradigm can be described by the relationship between the three primitives of robotics : Sense Plan Act . It can also be described by how sensory data is processed and distributed through the system, and where decisions are made.
Ubiquitous robot is a term used in an analogous way to ubiquitous computing . Software useful for "integrating robotic technologies with technologies from the fields of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, sensor networks , and ambient intelligence ".