Distributed, reconfigurable architecture for robot companions exemplified by a voice-mail application

The limitations of the computational capabilities of robots´ on-board computers necessitate the distribution of their control software in a cloud. This paper presents a distributed, reconfigurable control architecture based on the decomposition into agents, two of which are executed on the robot: the core agent is a fixed part of the controller, providing the task-independent robot capabilities, whereas the dynamic agent, loaded from the cloud when required, executes the task dependent program. The two mentioned agents execute the task, additionally utilising the capabilities of the cloud. The system is presented on an exemplary application of a NAO robot sending voice-mails.