Hierarchical control systems for autonomous space robots

Abstract

This paper presents a design procedure for hierar-chical robot controllers which are representable by a class of automata known as locally finite topological automata. At the heart of the design procedure is an algorithm known as the factorization algorithm which allows the decomposition of the controller into hierarchies that are abstractions of the control spec-ifications for the robot controller. The paper also discusses some possible implementation architectures for the controller.