How does "Modular hierarchical architecture concept" help us to enhance robot's function?

Abstract

As the study of autonomous mobile robots grows in popularity in recent years, the demand for designing simple, suitable, and reliable robot has also increased. However, a survey through literature reveals little about the software design process or unified methodology to actually design proper mobile robots. The software is developed in two main parts, one is the server application which consists Network, World Modeling, Global AI, Condition Monitoring and the second is a player application which consists Image processing, Network, local AI, Trajectory Planning and a MIMO Motion Controller. This paper proposes formalism for the description and automated implementation of the functional modules of an autonomous mobile robot in the framework of multi-layered control architectures. The formalization of the description of a module, including its behavior and its interfaces with other modules makes the implementation easier by providing higher level tools and automatic consistence checking tools in the module compiler. The software architecture allows high level communication between modules on different abstraction levels of the control architecture within one robot system as well as communication between different and heterogeneous robots and computers using wireless network. Very different behavior control paradigms may be realized on the basis of the developed architecture. Our experience of developing control architectures for autonomous mobile robots has led us to more modular systems than existing ones. In the architecture, perceiving processes are separated from the robot's behavior hierarchy. Behaviors can be executed in parallel, and there is a behavior selector in every layer to cope with conflictions among behaviors. Our architecture preserves and extends the key properties of behavior-based systems.