The next 700 control architectures for rescue robotics

Software architectures people use to control robots differ in their intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a particular phase of robot use (behavior design, tests, deployment, etc). They also differ in their physical appearance, and more importantly, in their logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncrasies reflect basic logical properties of the situation that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments? This question is important if we are trying to predict or influence robotic control architecture evolution. To answer it we must think in terms of families of control architectures instead of control architectures. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new control architecture is a point chosen from a well mapped space, instead of a laboriously devised construction.