Fuzzy behavior fusion for reactive control of an autonomous mobile robot: MARGE

A distributed heterogeneous network of fuzzy control agents has been developed for reactive behavior-based control of an autonomous mobile robot This methodology allows the authors´ vehicle, MARGE, to perform realistic tasks in unstructured environments. Control actions for the robot are generated by a colony of independent agents that compete and cooperate to determine the emergent motion of the vehicle. Fuzzy rules are used to implement a diverse array of real-time functions within one simple development environment. The authors´ multi-layer approach differs from other methods that perform the fuzzy inference mapping in one step. Real-time control without special hardware is possible by using a singleton centroid calculation and by breaking complex behaviors down into simple modules