Perceptual integration of piloting and navigation

The crucial issues of modularization and communication using the idea of perception as an integration and communication mechanism for robotic systems are addressed. A paradigm for integrating robotic systems by focusing attention on perception is described. The main problem with heavily modularized systems with distributed knowledge is intermodular communication, which requires translation between often vastly different representation languages. The author proposes that perceptual tokens may form a common substrate for the different languages, since all languages must refer to the real world (`perceptual grounding´). This approach is demonstrated in the design of a robotic pilot. The perceptual integration paradigm simplifies the task of designing integrated modular systems