The Assignment: A Light-Seeking Robot

The one of the above example can be improved in many ways:

• The robot tries to find regions of higher illumination by checking a small angle from its line of travel. Perhaps, from now and then it should stop and do a careful full-circle sweep? What are good ways of doing this, given that you don't know when you have turned full circle?
• Obstacle avoidance does not work well; perhaps, if it bumps too often, it should change strategy?
• The pet, or rather, the robot, should not move incessantly; this can be unnerving to the owner. Once it finds some region of relatively high light, and cannot find obvious improvements, or after it has been changing direction of travel all the time, or when it's uniformly dark (you decide), it may go in a sleep mode. It should wake up from the sleep mode when it feels a bump (don't wake up your pets with a kick, though), or when the light levels change suddenly.
• Add your own ideas to the above.

The goal is for you to make a smart robot, and to write some beautiful, structured, and superbly commented Esterel code. The main criteria for evaluation will be structure of the program, clarity, elegance, and sophistication in the robot model, and in the use of Esterel. In particular:

• Organize the state of the robot in "modes", and organize the mode changes, with suspensions, mode switches, and pre-emptions as appropriate.
• Try to experiment with various Esterel commands, including loops, traps, suspends, and so forth. You will be penalized if you stick to the same control structures throughout the code. Try to use always the most approprite and elegant way to achieve a goal.
• Try not to write long lists of sequential code, as in the example: structure your code, instantiate modules instead.

Homework Submission