A systematic method of designing control systems for service and field robots

Abstract

The paper presents a systematic approach to robot control system design. The robot is treated as an embodied agent decomposed into effectors, receptors, both real and virtual, and a control subsystem. Those entities communicate through communication buffers. The activities of those entities are governed by FSMs that invoke behaviours formulated in terms of transition functions taking as arguments the contents of input buffers and producing the values inserted into output buffers. The method is exemplified by applying it to a design of a control system of a robot capable of locating an open box and covering it with a lid. Other systems that have been designed in a similar way are presented as well, to demonstrate the versatility of the approach.