Spinoza: a stereoscopic visually guided mobile robot

Our mobile robot, Spinoza, embodies a sophisticated real-time vision system for the control of a mobile robot in a dynamic environment. The complexity of our robot architecture arises from the wide variety of tasks that need to be performed and the resulting challenge of coordinating multiple distributed, concurrent processes on a diverse range of processor architectures, including transputers, digital signal processors and a workstation host. The system handles the sensing, reasoning and action components of a robot, distributed over these architectures, and responds to unpredictable events in an unknown dynamic environment. Spinoza relies heavily on its capability to perform real-time vision processing in order to perform task such as mapping, navigation, exploration, tracking and simple manipulation.