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Programming Models

Robots are a typical class of hybrid systems. One of the most important challenges facing us is to develop theoretical and practical tools for designing hybrid embedded intelligent systems.

The hierarchical spatial and temporal structure of the levels in the standard robotic (such as Albus's NASREM architecture) map onto a set of software levels. The reasoning component dominates at the highest asynchronous level, while the lower levels, with control loops, are concerned with sensing (vision and robot base) and action (actuation and movement of the robot base.

We are working toward an implementation that will specify the controller for the robot using the terminology of Constraint Nets [21], but at present we use the layered approach to distribute the computation in a set of software modules that match the elements of the layers.

Much of the complexity of our robot architecture arises from the nature of the tasks and the challenge of coordinating multiple distributed, concurrent processes on a wide range of architectures. A robot engages in multiple asynchronous activities.



Vladimir Tucakov
Tue Oct 8 14:08:29 PDT 1996