The Accompanying Behavior Model and Implementation Architecture of Autonomous Robot Software

摘要

Autonomous robots are increasingly applied in realworld environments, and expect to execute plans robustly to accomplish the assigned tasks in the presence of dynamics and uncertainties of the changing environment. The robustness of plan execution requires the robot to keep aware of plan execution status and to adapt the plan towards possible execution contingencies. Such requirements pose a great challenge for autonomous robot software in terms of the abstraction model over robot behavior patterns. Conventional abstraction models for robot behaviors generally follow the sense-model-planact and behavior-based paradigms, which show limitations in tight integration with sensory inputs and tracking execution traces of robot plans. This paper proposes an accompanying behavior model that considers robot behaviors as task-oriented and observation-based types with diverse aims, and develops the run-time mechanisms to facilitate collaboration between two types of behaviors. Additionally, we implement the model by the multi-agent approach which develops the robot software as a multi-agent system. To demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of proposed model, we conduct a case study by implementing a typical example of service scenarios, e.g., a robot that autonomously picks up and drops off dishes for remote guests in the open and dynamic environment.