Autonomous Mobile Robots

Abstract

Agents are systems acting on some environment, including their minds. In this case, their action consists of taking decisions, manipulating information, etc. More generally, they act on the physical or social environment producing transitions from one state to another. In this contribution, agents are essentially autonomous, operate without the direct intervention of humans or others, and have some kind of control over their actions and internal state. Agents can be placed on a continuous dimension of autonomy, as several intermediate cases occur between full autonomy and full slavery. Indeed, limited autonomy is the paradigmatic case of humans. Sources of limited autonomy can be found both in resource scarcity and in agents' sharing a common environment. Due to resource scarcity agents may not possess all of the means needed for achieving their goals. Robots, unlike many software multi-agents systems, operate under real-world, real-time constraints where sensors and effectors with specific physical characteristics need to be controlled. To facilitate research in autonomous robotics and help architecture designers in managing the complexity of embodied agents, in this paper an autonomous robot control architecture have been developed that support various aspects of the agent development process, ranging from the design of an agent architecture, to its implementation on robot hardware, to executing it on the robot.