Mobile Robots: An Easy Way to Program Robotic Vacuums

This report details the design, implementation, and evaluation of two behavior-based control algorithms—reactive control and spatial knowledge control—for a mobile robot tackling the "Robot Vacuum" challenge on the VEXcode VR platform. The study compared a purely reactive algorithm, which proved simple and robust for basic evasion, against a hybrid deliberative-reactive algorithm incorporating a simple form of spatial and temporal knowledge. Experimental results showed that while the reactive algorithm achieved 67% coverage, the spatial knowledge algorithm reached 82% coverage, representing a 22.4% improvement in efficiency and a 47% reduction in revisiting previously explored areas. The conclusion is that the hybrid deliberative-reactive approach is more suitable for complex navigation tasks requiring defined spatial objectives