AN INTERACTIVE CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR MOBILE ROBOTS

Programming a robot to handle daily-life tasks in a dynamic changing environment with versatile and responsive behaviours is challenging. An intelligent robot needs to integrate many heterogeneous modules of various features using a powerful control architecture. This study aims to develop a methodology for designing a flexible real-time robot control system using an agent-based approach. The proposed control architecture decomposes a complex robotic control system into agents and allows heterogeneous modules to he integrated more efficiently. The software framework solves resource sharing, message flow and coding problems, and helps to integrate separate processes into a whole system with less effort. The proposed core components guarantee real-time response and high performance of the robotic system. This approach is also suitable for system integration of a research team, where the software modules from different, developers can be integrated on the robot and teamwork can he realized much easier. Interesting experiments on robotic focus attention and human robot interaction using two laboratory-developed robots demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control architecture.