From planning to execution monitoring control for indoor mobile robots

It is pointed out that the purpose of an autonomous mobile robot is to achieve various tasks while adapting its behavior to the variations of its environment. Therefore, such a robot needs both reflexive and planning capabilities. It appears that combining these is difficult; indeed, some robot architectures exhibit a high degree of reactivity, but poor planning abilities, or vice versa. The authors attempt to show that the integration of reflexive and planning capabilities is feasible. A novel generic architecture, composed of three levels, functional, control, and planner, is proposed. It provides important features such as progressive and programmable reactivity, robustness, and versatility. All these features are described at each level. A complete implementation in an experimental mobile robot is described, and an actual example is presented