Shield AI Fundamentals: On Mapping

Written by Vibhav Ganesh, Senior Autonomy Engineer. As is evident in the name, the key component of any autonomous robotic system is its basic autonomy; its loop of perception, cognition, and action which enables a robot to determine what it should do, when it should do it, and how. In the following paragraphs, I will cover the topic of mapping, an integral component of the perception component of this loop. In order to effectively operate within a complex and dynamic environment, a robot must be able to represent its surroundings. To do so, it seeks the answer to the question, "What does the world look like?" by creating a digital representation of the world called a map.