Robotics home pageWhile small companies with vision and imagination may pioneer the development of many-robot systems, larger companies with the resources to cost-optimize and mass-produce the products may ultimately dominate the marketplace. Because cost-optimal design will often depend sensitively on the performance and costs of candidate sensor and other components, and on both explicit mission-specific and implicit common sense application requirements, a wide variety of control schemes and behaviors will have to be developed. Unfortunately, the need for cost efficient tight physical integration will tend to make rapid prototyping difficult, complicating this evolution.
The development of a "standard" integration architecture, capable of supporting many different paradigms for intelligent control, would ameliorate this problem, just as the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS provided a standard framework within which independent developers of both hardware subsystems and software could implement their ideas. Such an integration architecture might incorporate aspects of LAN-based protocol stacks and EDA tools for ASIC development. The payoff will be to facilitate the exciting exploration of a very highly dimensioned design space, leading to the discovery of clever tricks for the efficient and effective use of hardware resources. And this is the ultimate lesson offered by natural evolution: the shameless exploitation of discovered opportunity.
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Last update: 1 December 1998.