Feeling the way - [electronics sensors]

Economy is the auntie of invention, and researchers are looking into creating simpler, cheaper robots. Simplicity provides the focus for a new generation of electronic robots as researchers try to work out how little they can get away with in terms of sensors. At the Artificial Life XI conference in Winchester, UK, engineers from Roke Manor Research demonstrated Dora, a robot that dispenses with expensive albeit accurate laser sensors and makes do with a single camera. Developed by Estelle Tidey of Roke, Dora has to work out where obstacles are by moving around the room. A single image provides little context for an image. The robot can pick up edges easily enough using conventional image processing. Where the robot's processing goes one stage further is to use motion to continually adjust its view of the world. It goes from having just a list of points on a flat space to a 3D 'point cloud' that it forms into a world view of the various objects in the area. A box or a table leg becomes a blob of points that describes places where Dora cannot go.