Real-time control architecture for an autonomous mobile robot

The FIRST system is composed of several robots which share common resources in a public environment. Therefore it is necessary to manage in real-time events with different scopes e.g. local and global events. The described control structure allows a hierarchical decision mechanism to be built from a local hardware (automaton) or software (activities and central supervisor) level up to a global software (ground station) or (human user) level. At each level, the reactivity of the system is enhanced through the decomposition into data processing and reactive control tasks that define the modules behaviour. The hardware architecture, composed of multiple processing units, is designed in order to provide reactivity and modularity.