A Robot with an Elephant’s Memory

Although ‘just for fun’ robotic applications can usually make do with the few bytes to few hundred bytes of Flash memory that’s available in most current microcontrollers, certain more ‘serious’ or more complex applications do need much greater memory capacities. A mobile robot may hold in its memory a complete mapping of an area in the form of co-ordinates like those provided by a GPS, for example. Alternatively, it may be required to collect a large quantity of data furnished by its sensors.