D2.1 Requirements and Specification - CORBYS

D2.1 Requirements and Specification
to “work” synergistically with human in real-time. Therefore, the main focus in this review is on architectures
for control of cognitive real-time robotic systems.
While it is clearly impossible to cover all architectures that have been developed, the aim is to present an
exploratory overview of the pre-eminent architectures that have been successfully utilised for control of
robotics systems in recent years. As the main objective of the CORBYS project is to design, develop and
validate integrated generic cognitive robot control architecture, the review will cover several architectures that
have been implemented in different robotic cognitive systems. The architectures will be analysed related to
the technologies which have been identified as needed to meet the challenges of nowadays and future robotics.
The focus will be on the following technologies that will be built on in CORBYS:
Sensing and Perception: Sensing is transformation of physical entities such as contact, force, sound and etc.
into internal digital representation. Perception is the extraction of key properties from these digital
representations and integration of sensory data over time.
Human-Robot Interaction: Human robot interaction is ability of robotic system to mutually communicate with
humans. That communication can be multi-modal: voice, physical contact, gestures and different types of
user interfaces.
Real-time control: Control system that is able to operate in real time, where real-time operation is defined as:
“The operating mode of a computer system in which the programs for processing of data arriving from the
outside are permanently ready, so that their results will be available with the predetermined periods of time;
the arrival times of the data can be randomly distributed or be already a priori determined depending on the
different applications” [DIN 44300].
Planning: Planning is calculation and selection of actions, motions, paths and missions.
Learning: Learning is change of robot behaviour based on practice, experience or teaching.
Communication: This property is concerned with hardware and software communication. Hardware
communication usually is based on industrial communication interfaces (CAN, Profibus, LIN, RS232,USB
and others), while software communication between software modules of architecture (often called the
middleware) is based on different protocols, like RPC (remote procedure call) or CORBA (common object
request broker architecture). There are two basic approaches in communication between software modules:
publish-subscribe and client-server.
System (software) architecture: Architecture defines the structure of system components, their
interrelationships, and the principles governing their design and evaluation over time.
13.1.1 System architectures
Although an “all win” architecture has not yet been developed, recent research has been mainly dedicated to
the use of hybrid open architectures. These architectures enable sophisticated control in complex
environments. Hybrid architectures replaced purely reactive or purely deliberative approach to the design of
robot control architecture as many researchers have argued that neither a completely deliberative nor
completely reactive approach is suitable for building robotic systems. The purely deliberative architectures
are known as Sense-Plan-Act (SPA) architectures as they are characterised by sensing or gathering data,
planning to take new actions based on this data, and acting out these plans. One of the most famous of the
SPA robots was Shakey, developed in the Stanford Research Institute (Nilsson, 1984). However, in realworld
applications Shakey’s planning system, like the planning systems of other SPA based robots, was
133