A robotic vehicle rolls through mud. Its Lidar lens is obscured. The sensor stops responding. What should the software do?
How do you design for that moment? I have spent decades designing and implementing systems that operate in and interact with the real world, including developing survivable architectures and logistics-aware control software. Every one of these systems has detailed behavior and performance requirements, but the requirements alone do not tell the whole story. The story also needs to include what the system is intended to accomplish and what kinds of environmental conditions the system is expected to encounter. This article will deal with a small software design feature for a teleoperated robotic ground vehicle. Each vehicle is equipped with many sensors. Sensor can include visual and infra-red cameras, Lidar sensors and radar sensors. Every sensor generates data very quickly. A human may consider the data generation to be continuous, but in reality the data is generated in very quick pulses. The rate the data is generated is commonly faster than a robotic system’s compute resou...