A hierarchical architecture to control autonomous robots evolving in an unknown environment

This paper addresses the problem of autonomy for mobile robots: on which part of the robot do we act more autonomy. After having modeled a mobile robot - limited to earth surface devices - we present an original mechanical structure that permits to a robot to be omni-directional; the experiments validate it. But the mechanical structure is not the only way to improve autonomy. So we have designed a functional architecture - based on multilevel architectures - to control mobile robots. Using an online local mapping of the environment, we have validated the first steps of this functional architecture on a second mobile robot, more powerful.