ROACH Software

That's Dr. Rodney Brooks, for those of you who don't know. For those of you who did, Here's Cog! His research has been the inspiration for the ROACH project.

Robotic Philosophy

Subsumption architecture in it's essence is great, but it is rather lacking in the ability to deal with complex facts such as relative position, and higher level reasoning. I propose an addition to the low level subsumption core similar to Maja Mataric's work with the 'Nerd Herd' at Brandeis, combined with a simpler fuzzy-like 'most likely answer' approach.

Low level control is handled by a subsumptive scaling technique, in which proximity, distance ranging, odometry, compass data, and simple mapping are combined to form a real-time current position estimation.

Implimentation

Ok, now how do you impliment such a nifty idea on ~16k of RAM (the other 18k is eaten up by IC)? First we can strip away some of the crap, err, irrelevant code that is built in to IC. One of the problems with using the 6.270 board is that it was designed for a specific aplication, quite diferent than a behavior-based programming application.

The inter-process communication available in IC allows for the seperate subsumption modules to communicate their status to one another.

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