New Book and Online Robot Simulator

Joseph Jones · 2003-12-18T13:44:54+00:00

In my experience, the most effective way to program a mobile robot is to usea behavior-based approach. Uncomplicated behavior-based methods enablerobots that are at once robust, sophisticated, and inexpensive. Thus italways bothers me that few amateurs, hobbyists, and educators seem to takefull advantage of this powerful approach to robot programming.So I wrote another book. McGraw-Hill has just published, ³Robot ProgrammingA Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics.² The new book seeks topresent behavior-based robotics in a way that makes it accessible to a wideaudience and shows how behavior-based techniques can be implemented onlow-end microprocessors. In an attempt to make learning the skills aspainless as possible the book is integrated with an online robot simulatorcreated by my colleague, Dan Roth, of MIT. You can find the simulator andinformation about the book at: Joe Jones

Dec 18, 2003 22 Replies

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Brian Dean 22 years ago

No necessarily. While I prefer using switch/case as well since I think it makes the code more readable, I have found that if/then's generate smaller code at least when using avr-gcc. At least this was the case (no pun intended) a while back. I'll need to double check the latest GCC version to see if it performs similarly.

I discovered this while doing some work on an AT90S2313 a while back which has only 2K of flash. The code was getting very tight and I was able to free up a significant amount of space by rewriting switch/case as if/then.

I'm still waiting on my copy, though. Amazon says it shipped today.

-Brian

-- Brian Dean, snipped-for-privacy@bdmicro.com BDMICRO - Maker of the MAVRIC ATmega128 Dev Board

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Daniel Roth 22 years ago

Hi Randy,

Thanks for taking a look at the robot simulator. Joe and I are hoping that it will help people get an idea of how easy it is to do powerful things with a behavior-based robot architecture.

Could you please email me a description of the problems you had with the simulator? I'd like to look into getting the bugs worked out.

Thanks!

Daniel Roth

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Randy M. Dumse 22 years ago

Gladly. Done.

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