Writing a specification
Our next task is to write specifications for our various components. I’ll go through an example here that we must do as part of our toy-grasping robot project: we need to select a camera. Just any old camera will not do – we need one that meets our needs. But what are those needs? We need to write a camera specification so that when we are looking at cameras to buy, we can tell which one will do the job.
We’ve created our storyboard and our use cases, so we have the information we need to figure out what our camera needs to do. We can reverse engineer this process somewhat: let’s discuss what things make one camera different from another. First of all is the interface: this camera goes on board the robot, so it has to interface with the robot’s computer, which has USB, Ethernet, and a special camera bus. What other things about cameras do we care about? We certainly care about cost. We don’t want (or need) to use...
