High level software architecture for autonomous mobile robot

6Bender II was tested in range of environments on a number of missions. Due tolimited space only single test example is described. The mission goal was to travelin indoor environment from defined start location to defined goal location. Duringthe mission a number of static obstacles not included in the map and precomputedlocalization data were positioned both on expected track and around. At the sametime the dynamic obstacles (people) were wandering at various speed and distancesin the environment. Figure 5 shows planned track of the robot together withits estimated position. The gaps in location estimation are caused by improving theestimate precision via PCSM localization. As you can see, globally planned trackgoes through static obstacles, as those were not incorporated in the map and thereforethe planning algorithm was not aware of those. As the steering of the robot islimited, reversing is included in obstacle avoidance for obstacles detected too latefor direct avoidance.ConclusionPresented high level software architecture represents general framework for bothindoor and outdoor environment autonomous mobile robots. The architecture issensor independent and can be extended when robot hardware equipment changes/ improves or when new robot missions are defined. The number of tests performedwith Bender II autonomous robot that uses this architecture proved that itis usable and flexible. Further improvements can be obtained by replacing the currentlyused simple rules mechanism in Task manager module by more advancedmodules, e.g. based on Bayesian approach.References[1] Buehler M. Iagnemma K., Singh S. (Editors): The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: TheGreat Robot Race (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics), Springer, 2007[2] Brooks, R.A.: A Robots Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot, IEEE Journal of Roboticsand Automation, 2, pp 14-23, 1986[3] Connell J.H.: SSS: A Hybrid Architecture Applied to Robot Navigation, in Proc. of theIEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 1992, Nice, France[4] Krejsa J., Věchet S.: Dealing with Sensor Errors in Scan Matching for Simultaneous Localizationand Mapping, Engineering Mechanics, volume 15, number 5, (2008), pp. 337-344[5] Kalisiak M., van de Panne, M.: RRT-blossom: RRT with a local flood-fill behavior, in Proceedingsof International Conference on Robotics & Automation 2006, Orlando, Florida,USA, 2006Acknowledgments Published results were acquired with the support of the Ministry of Education,Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, research plan MSM 0021630518 "Simulationmodeling of mechatronic systems"