Agent-based distributed architecture for mobile robot control

Mobile robots are physical agents that move and interact continuously while embedded in a dynamic environment. Communications can be one of the most difficult parts of building robot architecture because of the increasing complexity of sensor and actuator hardware, and the interaction between intelligent features and real-time constraints. Currently, hybrid architectures offer the most widespread solutions for controlling intelligent mobile robots. This paper deals with the communications framework necessary to design and implement these architectures. The main goal of this work1 is to design a modular and portable architecture that allows the development of robot control systems. A multi-level and distributed architecture based on the reactive/deliberative paradigm is presented. Its main components are mobile software agents that interact through a distributed blackboard communications framework. These agents can be run on onboard processors, as well as on fixed workstations depending on their real-time restrictions. The presented control architecture has been tested in a real mobile robot and results demonstrate the effectiveness of distributing software agents to guarantee hard real-time execution.