A practical implementation of a hierarchical control system for telerobotic land vehicles

The author presents a practical hierarchical control system for telerobotic land vehicles. The goal of the architecture is to enable the user to have a relatively inexpensive control system that can be easily upgraded as the application demands. This is accomplished by having low-level modules that provide interfaces to hardware and the external environment and communicate with higher levels through the global memory. The levels of the hierarchy above the first level, referred to as layers of intelligence, are application dependent and allow the vehicle to execute more autonomous operation as the layers are added. There remains an operator interface to all levels of the hierarchy so that previous capabilities may be demonstrated while adding new levels. This architecture was implemented on RAYBOT, a robotic land vehicle at Sandia National Laboratories. The vehicle control module and the first layer of intelligence (teleoperation) have been implemented in hardware and have performed well. The ability to make quick modifications to the control system and the advantages of the hierarchical architecture have been demonstrated