Eager sensing is the policy of continually having sensors on, and
feeding environmental data into the architecture. Architectures that have
such a policy make two assumptions:
Sensing ought to be done often in dynamic
and unpredictable environments. In such
environments an architecture's internal model of reality my quickly become
out-of-date because events beyond its control happen. Also, if the
architecture wants to assure a rapid speed of response
it helps to continually sense to monitor its own actions.
That sensing is a cheap operation depends alot on the sensors and the domain. We may generalize the notion of "cost" to be penalities of operating. Eager sensors assume a low penality. A specific consideration is "is there adequate energy to operate the sensor?" Passive sensors, in general, are more energy efficient than passive ones.
The advantages of eager sensing are:
Lazy sensing is the policy of only having sensors on when
environmental data is specifically requested. Architectures that have
such a policy assume sensing is a costly operation.
As was mentioned for eager
sensing, "cost" may have many dimensions. Active sensors generally take more
energy to operate, so it makes sense only to have them on when their data will
be used. Active sensors may unintentionally jam each other (e.g. sonar in an
enclosed area), so their usage might have to be synchronize. In some
applications, obtaining information with active sensors might be fatal for the
agent's life (e.g. a radar-equiped military robot facing an opponent who scans
for radar), or made have bad effects on someone else's health (e.g. a medical
expert system that must decide whether the benefit of performing an X-ray is
worth the health risk).
Other Properties
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Examples of Eager Sensing Architectures are:
Examples of Lazy Sensing Architectures are:
Examples of Architectures that make no commitment are: