Integrative architecture of the autonomous hand-eye robot JANUS

The importance of a good architectural design is often overlooked in the furor and excitement of new-age task-motivated and reactive robot construction. However the lack of a good architecture will often prove to be a weak link in an otherwise successful prototype, especially when development reaches the interesting stage of extension to more general functionality, or the introduction of adaptivity and higher-level control loops. In this article we describe various aspects of the architecture underlying our hand-eye reactive robot JANUS. The architecture allows at every level the introduction of functionality extensions and adaptivity. Furthermore, the intrinsic parallelism of the architecture enables easy porting from a single host computer to one or more computer clusters to produce immediate and significant operation speed-up. A central characteristic of the architecture is its integrative nature. This is illustrated by the way in which autonomous components dealing with motorics and sensorics can exchange information and work actively with each other.