Control of mobile robot actions

The authors present a control system architecture for mobile robots able to execute missions specified by a user and having reactivity and error recovery capacities. The architecture is based on three types of entities: modules that accomplish basic computations on data from sensors; processes that establish dynamic links between perception and action to achieve closed-loop behavior; and functional units providing specific functionalities. These modules are organized hierarchically and are considered to be the robot´s resources. The authors introduce and discuss a generic control system structure, which is based on a decomposition of its functions mainly into an executive for managing robot resources and a surveillance manager for detecting and reacting to asynchronous events. The control system enables the robot to execute missions (plans) expressed in a command language. Several running examples are given