Robotics Brainstorming

I've had a lot of robotics thoughts on my mind so I thought I would share them here.

Firstly I have been thinking about self healing robots. The technology seems to exist for robots that are able to repair themselves, so that would be pretty cool. Another area I've been thinking about is self replicating robots, or robots that build themselves based on a bunch of components. A robot that is able to change it's shape, transformer style would be pretty cool too.

Ok so now back to my current robot. Well in terms of behaviour, I will be attempting to take my Final Year Project (Mars Rover Planning System implemented in Java as a piece of software) and attemtping to program it into a physical robot.

There are going to be some problems with this, in particular relating to distance calculations and determining it's own location. When building it purely from a software perspective, my Mars terrain was a fixed value. This meant that it was always going to be that fixed space and the rocks and rover could be added anywhere within that space. Using java code the robot could determine it's own location and then using pytahgoras' theorem determine how far each rock was.

Now, I guess in a real environment this could be overcome by creating a fixed grid like environment but that to me sort of defeats the point. Also, if it was a fixed grid, how does the robot determine it's own location? (Unless it always starts from the same position). As well as that, what about determining the distance of the objects I mean the sensors would have to really perform on this front. I haven't as of yet played with the sensors or quite deduced how I will do this but it's definitely something worth thinking about.