A Layered Architecture for Office Delivery Robots
Reid Simmons,
Richard Goodwin, Karen Zita Haigh, Sven Koenig, Joseph O'Sullivan
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Autonomous Agents 1997. Pages 245-242.
Office delivery robots have to perform many tasks. They have to
determine the order in which to visit offices, plan paths to those
offices, follow paths reliably, and avoid static and dynamic obstacles
in the process. Reliability and efficiency are key issues in the
design of such autonomous robot systems. They must deal reliably with
noisy sensors and actuators and with incomplete knowledge of the
environment. They must also act efficiently, in real time, to deal
with dynamic situations. Our architecture is composed of four
abstraction layers: obstacle avoidance, navigation, path planning, and
task scheduling. The layers are independent, communicating processes
that are always active, processing sensory data and status information
to update their decisions and actions. A version of our robot
architecture has been in nearly daily use in our building since
December 1995. As of July 1996, the robot has traveled more than 75
kilometers in service of over 1800 navigation requests that were
specified using our World Wide Web interface.