Architecture for a human-robot symbiotic system

A description is given of a human-robot symbiont that is under development. The authors present an overview of the symbiotic system, motivating the architecture that has been developed. The architecture is a hierarchical structure that consists of several expert systems which reside above a robot control interface. This interface allows the manipulator to be operated in both a teleoperated and autonomous mode. All these processes coexist with the lower level of the hierarchy, which is a numerically intensive control algorithm. The architecture is implemented on five processors in a coarsely parallel system.<<ETX>>