Vision-based Robot Navigation

Starting with a summary of the history of Artificial Intelligence, this book makes the bridge to the modern debate on the definition of Intelligence and the path to building Intelligent Machines. Since the definition of Intelligence is itself subject to open debate, the quest for Intelligent machines is pursuing a moving target. Apparently, intelligent behaviour is, to a great extent, the result of using a sophisticated associative memory, more than the result of heavy processing. The book describes theories on how the brain works, associative memory models and how a particular model - the Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) - can be used to navigate a robot based on visual memories. Other robot navigation methods are also comprehensively revised and compared to the method proposed. The performance of the SDM-based robot has been tested in different typical problems, such as illumination changes, occlusions and image noise, taking the SDM to the limits. The results are extensively discussed in the book.