I''m trying to learn basic AI-ideas and have come across a small problem that I''d liek to solve in a good way. It''s described in the book "Artificial Intelligence - A modern approach". It''s about a "smart" vacuum cleaner which should clean a (unknown size) rectangle area. This area is filled with empty spaces, forbidden spaces and dirt. I was wondering if there are a general idea about how to do this the most econimical way when the only action available are: suck, move forward, turn left, turn right. The sensor stimulus are . Best regards Fredrich

There are many articles on the topic of real world nagivation. There is no ''one'' best approach.

Nasa has an asteroid hunting rover in the Antarctic that drives along a grid. Back and forth, back and forth.

The ''smart'' lawn mowers use boundry points and kind of randomly move all over the place until the lawn is mowed.

Your solution will really depend on how much you know about the environment, and how many ''sensors'' your vacume can access.

Chances are, you wouldn''t use a ''classical'' AI to solve this. Do a search on Path finding and see what pops up.

Good luck,
Will

The Antartic explorer that RPG was referring to was designed and is currently at my school. Here''s the link to CMU''s Nomad project site. Take a look at the papers there, something might pop up that you understand.

Link:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/meteorobot2000/

Brendan

If i''m not mistaken, the book has the pseudocode for it, and considering thats one of the first problems they show in the book, if you are having trouble with it, you might consider stepping back and studying the language more.

I may be wrong... but it seemed fairly self explanatory when i went through it