A New Conceptual Approach to the Design of Hybrid Control Architecture for Autonomous Mobile Robots

A detailed analysis and comparison of various control architectures is presented in order to meet the challenging design requirements targeted. All the present advanced control systems have certain advantages and disadvantages compared with each other. Due to the lack of an optimal control system with desired capabilities, such a control system has been the focus of recent robotics research programs. The new approach proposed in this paper is a hybrid control system that takes the advantages of various control structure types thereby integrating them in a way that results in an overall increase in synergy. The proposed control architecture presents a new approach to the design of supervisory control system that utilizes reactive, deliberative, distributed and centralised control approaches, and uses fuzzy logic as well as modular hierarchical structure. The architecture carries out supervision, modification and execution of commands generated by the centralised command arbitration module by conducting fuzzy logic integration of activated behaviours from distributed, independent asynchronous decision making processes that takes information from the user, sensory system and task description, thus providing goal-oriented, real-time responsive and tele-operable control system architecture. The resulting control system was experimented on and it was observed that not only was the response time sufficiently short, but also it exhibited robustness, flexibility, adaptability, portability and expandability.